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Q about completely formatting the drive
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OpenStep
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Join Date: May 2001
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May 16, 2003, 05:01 PM
 
I have a 20 gig drive that was pulled from a PC running WinXP and I want to put it into an extra iMac 350 MHz I have. Should I format the drive on the PC first with the drive diagnostics to low level the drive, then format it with Mac OS X? Disk utility has an option for writing the disk with zero's. Is this the same as low leveling on a PC? I just want to be sure the drive is completely blank and nothing is left on the mbr or anything before installing Jaguar.
     
The Placid Casual
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May 16, 2003, 06:53 PM
 
I'm not familiar with the 'Low Leveling' you speak of... however I would bet the answer to the question will depend on how much you want the disk to be totally unrecoverable/blank...

If you merely want a 'clean' drive for a new install of Jaguar, I would suggest that the 'Disk Utility' method will be fine...

If you were deleting personal data like Bank details or something before selling a machine, I would be much more wary...

To me, short of shredding and melting the actual disk platter, someone wil be able to recover data... Th US Gvt recommends 7 passes minium of rewrite to render data unrecoverable... I don't think there are any apps so far on OSX that can accomplish this easily.
     
Rainy Day
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May 17, 2003, 11:25 PM
 
Should I format the drive on the PC first with the drive diagnostics to low level the drive, then format it with Mac OS X?
No.

Disk utility has an option for writing the disk with zero's. Is this the same as low leveling on a PC?
No it's not the same thing, but it will be fine for what you're trying to accomplish, and far healthier for your drive than a low level format.

Low level formats are a hold-over from ancient times. On modern drives, it's actually a bad idea. The reason is rather technical, but the short version is this: A low level format will move all the existing sector start and end tags, which means all sectors will be moved to new physical locations on the disc surface. Due to the nature of the magnetic media, every time this is done, the likelihood of disk read or write errors increases (because the old information isn't erased, and the magnetic "noise" on the disk is increased). And somewhat counterintuitively (at least at first), it actually makes it easier (for the professionals) to recover what was previously stored on the disk.

Low level formatting used to be used to "eliminate" bad sectors. Later, drives began using spare blocks to solve the bad sector problem.

To me, short of shredding and melting the actual disk platter, someone wil be able to recover data... Th US Gvt recommends 7 passes minium of rewrite to render data unrecoverable...
And the DOD only shreds decommissioned drives which have ever held, or may have held, secret info.

I don't think there are any apps so far on OSX that can accomplish this easily.
iWipe?
     
   
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