Paul:

This method of rendering hard disk data unaccessible leaves artifacts.
Using "fdisk /mbr" does not "wipe" the mbr, but instead re-copies a backup
MBR to the boot sector. If your backup MBR contains portions of your
deleted partition table and old boot record, then there would be a conflict
vis-a-vis your new partition table.

Moreover, this method only re-arranges the logical disk structure. Your
data, at the sector level, still exists until overwritten by recording new
bits.

A better method is to use a hardware-level sector zeroing utility such as
IBM's WIPE.COM. A link to this utility is on my old web site at:

        http://www.digitalconcern.com/Students/bootfloppy.htm

This is not a DOD-approved method either, but should suffice for your
purposes. HTH.

Regards,

John Chin
IT Academy Coordinator
http://www.mdcc.edu/itacademy




>Date:    Mon, 5 May 2003 17:02:27 -0400
>From:    Paul Hachmeyer <[log in to unmask]>
>Subject: Formatting drives and fdisk /mbr
>
>I've been trying to recycle some older pc's (Pentium I or
>better) as giveaways to middle school students.
>Because the machines were often used in offices for 2 years
>or so and may contain confidential data after a previous
>life of 2-3 years in student labs, I've been running fdisk
>to remove all partitions, fdisk /mbr to wipe the mbr, then
>setting drive to one large partition and formatting it as
>fat16.
>Problem is that about 1/2 the drives won't format again;
>either format just stops or I get errors indicating that the
>drive is bad.  I have not been running scandisk before
>starting, but all the machines were working  on a daily
>basis prior to my acquisition.
>Am I losing the drive data that flags bad sectors by
>performing the fdisk /mbr and then failing format because
>the drive can't bypass the bad sectors?   Am I doing
>something in the wrong sequence?

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