Drive wipe

[Snowman]

Is the IBM wipe just for IBM or can it be use on any hard drive?

Is there any other better ones then this one? Thanks

[lechumbl]

Hi Bill,

Don't know about IBM Drive Wipe, but why not just partition and format the drive.

If is free, and will be secure.

If you do a quick format, that data can be recovered by certain softwares. If you partition and format, it can not.

If you are concerned about security, that is the best free way.

Take care.....

[Snowman]

Lee A Friend has his maxtor drive partition NTFS and wants to go back to fat 32 so I have to wipe the drive to do this.

[sptw]

It's not necessary to do that.Anyway it takes a long time to fill the entire disk with zeros.
Unfortunately, maxtor'tools sucks for this.Here is another way to do that.I use to use this little command line.It uses assembler language and is so easy.Do that:

- Make a startup(pay attention, startup diskette, not boot diskette) diskette using win98 or Win 98SE(prefer this last).
- Boot with this diskette.As soon as you get the a:>, type debug and hit enter.
- Type exactly in this way on the blink cursor:
F200 L200 0 (enter)
a100 (enter)
mov ax,301 (enter)
mov bx,200 (enter)
mov cx,1 (enter)
mov dx,80 (enter)
int 13 (enter)
int 3 (enter)
(enter again)
g=100
q
- You're done.Now you have a new disk.Do what you want now.

[Snowman]

Thanks sptw I'll give it a try :)

[sptw]

It works, and if you have a win98 startup diskette, it take only a few seconds.This command lines only fills the first sector of the HD with zeros.Don't worry, it can't damage your disk.

[Snowman]

Do I go to add remove programs and make the start up disk there, or just format a disk with copy system files only

[sptw]

The first option billg2911 is the correct..the second " just format a disk with copy system files only" doesn't work.

[Synthohol]

of the zillion hdd's ive wiped i usually boot w/floppy and fdisk /MBR
then reboot, fdisk partitions away, reboot, fdisk,reboot and format.
ill try your way next time it seems fast enough.
btw will your way remove the stupid e-z bios crap on the older ones? i've only been successfull by booting up w/ the e-z bios disk and then remove software. even fdisk /mbr wont do it, does it write to the firmware on the disk? just curious, not in any need soon!

[sptw]

Hi Synthohol :)

No, this little piece of codes doesn't write to the firmware on the disk.What it does is to fill on the first sector of the hard disk with bit 0.The first instruction is to fill 512 bytes of the memory with zeros, start on 200h address.The next instruction (a100) ordain to the debug to open the progamming mode on the 100h address.After this start the little portion in assembler that use the 13h service.All the Hds use the 13h interruption services defined by BIOS.With the use of this 13h service we can fill the four registers on the CPU: AX, BX, CX and DX.This four 16 bits registers make a presence in all x86 architecture. What happen then is a little complex to explain here and i think it's not necessary, beside the fact that i am not a programmer :D
About the EZ bios question, yes it can remove the stupid e-z bios crap on the older ones.Generally EZ BIOS can get to be overwritten when a user boots directly from bootable floppy diskette, and the first boot device is set as a floppy on Bios settings.By booting in this manner the EZ BIOS code does not get a chance to load, and then you can use the little codes lines described above.
About the Fdisk/mbr, the ms-dos Fdisk utility usually updates the master boot record (MBR) only if no master boot record exists. Repartitioning with Fdisk does not rewrite this information.The undocumented parameter called fdisk/mbr causes it to write the master boot record to the hard disk without altering the partition table information.Fdisk/mbr doesn't work in certain conditions.

[sptw]

Hi again Synthohol,

Sorry, but i made a little confusion on question if "it write to the firmware on the disk" and could see now that this question is related with EZ-bios and not for that little pieces of codes that i showed above.
The answer is no too.It doesn't write to the firmware on the disk.It resides on the Logical Block Address 0 on the hard drive.This code replaces the normal MBR.EZ-bios has three components:
EZ-Bios MBR , Int13 Handler and Regular MBR.
When using EZ-Bios, it boots in this way:
1. The system BIOS uses it’s own Int13 to load and execute LBA 0 of device 80h, which is usually the boot drive in a system.That sector contains the EZ-BIOS MBR.
2. The EZ-BIOS MBR uses the system BIOS Int13 to load and call the code in LBA 2 through 16, which is the EZ-BIOS Int13 handler.The resident portion starts at 635k and the initialization portion is below that. The memory location in the ROM BIOS data area that contains the number of kilobytes of conventional memory installed is decremented by 5k, which effectively protects the memory from being overwritten by the Operational System.
3. After the Int13 handler is initialized, EZ-BIOS is controlling the drive and the system BIOS is no longer used. Execution is returned to the EZ-BIOS MBR, still resident in lower memory, which then loads the Regular MBR in LBA 1 and jumps to it.

[Synthohol]

after the 5th read it is no longer over my head, thanx for the explaination. good lord were you taught that somwhere or did you research it? i now have a nice mental flowchart on HDD boot operation. thank you :)