🚀 go-pugleaf

dpoleshuck <davedeby@erols.com> wrote in message news:3677a569.255284008@news.erols.com...
> Rod Speed <rspeed@dragnet.com.au> wrote:

>> Now completely clear your hard drive and completely eliminate
>> any possibility that something is being loaded at boot time by
>> the remains of some boot loader left in the boot sector. The
>> easiest way to do this is with a ute called CLEARHDD from
>> http://www.sec.samsung.co.kr/support/contact/FILES/CLEARHDD.EXE

>> That just completely scrubs all data from the first few tracks of the drive.

> Does that utility work on all hard drives?

Yeah, its completely generic and just puts zeros in those early sectors.
There are plenty of other ways to get the same result, its just very
simple to use, you just specify the drive and confirm the erase twice.

> I am a teacher who is (with a lot of help from students) is fixing
> up donated computers, some of which have some strange little
> partitions on them. I am already using fdisk but am a little worried.

Yeah, its particularly useful in that situation. fdisk can have a significant
brain fart with the first physical sector on the hard drive. That has some
hard drive physical layout stuff in that sector, the cylinder/heads/sectors
per track data. If you change the drive type in the cmos from the one
which was used to fdisk the drive, fdisk can be too stupid to notice that
the physical config has changed and you can get some weird effects.

Using that ute to zero out all the data in the first physical sector
forces fdisk to rewrite the physical data again and its now going
to be the right data for the current drive type. This can be quite
important for the older non LBA motherboards.

The reason that ute zeros out more than just the first physical sector is
to allow for the various hard disk drivers like MaxBlast etc which can put
themselves in the unused sectors in the first physical track and modify the
boot loader to load themselves at boot time so they can remap the drive.
The easiest way to get rid of all of them is to just zero out all the data in
those early sectors of the drive and then they are gone forever.