On Sun November 11 2007 11:13:31 am Jeff Mahoney wrote: > Carl Hartung wrote: > > Personally, I've only ever had success doing "fresh" installations on > > truly clean partitions (not just "formatted" during installation, but > > wiped first.) > > But wiped too? That's just overkill. The only report I've heard recently > of anything approaching needing a "wipe" was when the Windows NTFS > formatter left a reiserfs superblock intact on disk. Even then, zeroing > out a single block fixed the problem. Otherwise, as far as the installer > and kernel are concerned, the file system is gone if it's been formatted > over.
Hi Jeff, I've been 'doing computers' and electronics since 1986 and lived and worked in the industry in Silicon Valley for over a dozen years. That time was split roughly equally between software and hardware manufacturing :-) Your understanding and assertion is logical to both of us but it is only a design ideal/objective. Empirically, over the past three years, I know of three circumstances where exceptions have surfaced -- 'ghost' files from prior installations appeared alongside expected, current data. Since much of the logic has migrated down into the drives, themselves, and each manufacturer and production release carries it's own 'flavor' of hardware and firmware... since this also causes drivers to be moving targets... we will *always* be contending with 'special cases.' I don't consider it "overkill" to guard against these eventualities when the extra steps do not consume much time and are free. If we had to send drives out to specialists to be 'wiped' for a price, I'd probably conclude differently. :-) This, of course, is dependent upon existential variables such as 'Is this a test or hobby or production system?' and 'How 'fresh' vs. 'mature' is the hardware I'm installing on?' and so on. Anyway, I appreciate your comments and I hope this sheds some new light on the topic for you. regards, Carl P.S. Please reply only to the list. I don't need two copies of your posts. :-) -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
