Can anyone recommend an app that FULLY zeros your drive?

[The Sewer Rat]

My new 60gb seagate barracuda will not give up its MBR when you try to do a format – this causes problems when you try to install an os…the old boot.ini reappears to halt your install dead.

Also, does anyone know of a good app to read MBRs and put things right? Thanks.

[MetalCartman]

With fdisk under pure DOS you can rewrite the master boot record:

fdisk /mbr

[Wombat]

Yep. Formatting alone doesn't change the MBR.

[K6-III]

Seagate also has a util on their site that lets you do that.....

[thop]

strong magnet will work wonders.

[Chrono_Wanderer]

wouldn't magnets kill the HDD?

[Gear]

If you have a Linux boot-able CD at hand, boot it, get into a shell,and at the prompt write:
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda

If you don't want to zero-out everything, add to the command: bs (blocksize)=1024k (1MB) count=100 (or how many times you want), for ex:
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda bs=1024k count=1000

Hope this helps,

[ayoub_ibrahim]

this will zero your hdd!

[alewisa]

DOS 3.21 - part.com and prep.com will kill everything. Might need the Zentih supplied DOS3.21 though. Works wonders, even preps disks that FDISK will not touch.

Norton's used to do it (7 times overwriting to every sector). If you have access to an Amiga, stick it in there.

OTOH, in the dark old days (ie 10 years ago), a mate used to run the biggest warez BBS in the UK. All the drives were externally housed, and wrapped with several dozen lengths of electical flex, plugged into the mains. The idea (tested once to prove concept) was that if FAST ever came a-knockin', he'd flick the mains switch on, and instant bulk HD erasure ensured. ;-) I often think about the same solution viz-a-viz my ex-wife... :---)

[Dogbert]

BeOS 5 install cd has a HDD setup utility. It saved a few HDDs that FDISK wouldn't recognise.

[VJ]

I have 2 small dos-pograms:
zap just zerofills the mbr
wipe zefofills the entire hdd
(perhaps a search on google will help you find these tools; if not, I can post them tomorrow)


Jörg

[VJ]

Here are they :
http://www.storage.ibm.com/hdd/support/download.htm (scroll down)


Jörg

[The Sewer Rat]

thanks a lot - i'll try them out when i next format my comp (prob quite soon, since im getting fed up of xp.)

[Evildead666]

Seagate supplies a small utility diskette to boot from on their website.

It would be wise to try to use that before anything else.

edit :

http://www.seagate.com/support/disc/drivers/discwiz.html

[The Sewer Rat]

[QUOTE]Originally posted by Evildead666
[B]Seagate supplies a small utility diskette to boot from on their website.[QUOTE]

that is precisely the utility that, when used to format, leaves your MBR mysteriously undeleted.

discwizard was only useful for the dynamic drive thing (and even that is available everywhere else.)