Low Level Formatting

[Nude_Lewd_Man]

[stroyal]

Finally, an easy question.
But you beat me to the answer.

[stroyal]

Oh, it's an "iso" image! I got it now!

Well, I'm using "autonuke", and it says I have 1:55 to go for the process to complete. If so, I'll know before I leave for my 3-day weekend whether or not this has worked.

Is "autonuke" sufficient to get rid of everything on the hard drive including any recovery partitions for Windows7?

Auto always took much less, than it said, with me.

I think anything more than that, is just for security.

[Nude_Lewd_Man]

Any news about this..?

[JasmineTF]

Any news about this..?

The process finished successfully just before I left work on Friday. I'm off today (King Day), so I won't know until tomorrow if the imaging process will now work.

[Nude_Lewd_Man]

"King Day"..???

In theory, and in practice from my experience, if you're just wanting to apply the image onto a drive, then you could just use something like FDISK and ImageX, along with something like WinPE... Boot to WinPE, go into FDISK to wipe all the partitions and create the one/s you want, drop back to the standard CLI (still in WinPE) to format the partition/s and then ImageX to apply an image (that you've already created) onto the partition...

IIRC, the FDISK command you'd want would be 'select disk 0' and 'clean', then you'd have a disk with no partitions. The other things you'd need after that would be 'create partition [n]' (where [n] is the number of megabytes you want it have), 'assign letter:C' and 'active' before using 'exit' to drop out of the FDISK utility. Bear in mind that I haven't done this for ~9 months, so there might be a slight difference in the commands than I recall now………

[JasmineTF]

Yep, that's what I do. I boot up with winPE, put in the "diskpart" command, choose, clean, repartition, assign, make active, and then exit. I don't assign a size because, I was told, that makes it default to one volume for the whole drive, which is what I want. I then use ImageX to load the proper image.

So, that's exactly what I'm going to do first thing tomorrow morning when I get in.

See, great minds do think alike!

[Nude_Lewd_Man]

That is correct, if you don't specify a size, it will use the entire space available...but I used to use that method to only make a small partition for when I was updating the SysPrep'd reference image, before re-capturing the image, then re-wiping the drive and re-applying the image.. (I also used to defrag the 'reference install first, so that there was no fragmentation when pushing it back out.. )

You're right, it was DISKPART rather than FDISK that was used...but, to be fair, I was still half asleep... (I've been 'online' with my BlackBerry for the previous responses..and this one...)

[JasmineTF]

You're right, it was DISKPART rather than FDISK that was used...but, to be fair, I was still half asleep... (I've been 'online' with my BlackBerry for the previous responses..and this one...)

I discovered this morning that you can do a low level format in Diskpart if you specify "Clean All" instead of just "Clean", so you don't have to bother with loading up something else to do it.

Clean All - Specifies that each and every sector on the disk is zeroed, which completely deletes all data contained on the disk.

That is a low level format, right?

[stroyal]

I discovered this morning that you can do a low level format in Diskpart if you specify "Clean All" instead of just "Clean", so you don't have to bother with loading up something else to do it.

Clean All - Specifies that each and every sector on the disk is zeroed, which completely deletes all data contained on the disk.

That is a low level format, right?

I'm not sure, but I thought low level format, was even more basic, than righting 1s and 0s.
I also don't think righting 1s and 0s is part of any, normal format.

According to this,
Disk formatting - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
true low level format, can only be done at the factory since the mid 90s.

Many programs, that say they are low level format, are just righting 0s, and repartitioning.

That being said, I have 120gig Maxtor, that somehow got corrupted 7 years ago, and wouldn't do anything.

I downloaded, a low level format from the manufacturers sight, and ran it.

It took 16 hours,, but I still have that drive today, and it works perfectly.

I guess I still don't know if it was a low level format, but I thought it was.

[JasmineTF]

I'm not sure, but I thought low level format, was even more basic, than righting 1s and 0s.
I also don't think righting 1s and 0s is part of any, normal format.

According to this,
Disk formatting - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
true low level format, can only be done at the factory since the mid 90s.

Many programs, that say they are low level format, are just righting 0s, and repartitioning.

Oh, wow! That was very informative! Apparantly, it's a very misused term, and it's probably something I wouldn't really need to do anyway.

Thanks!

[stroyal]

You are welcome, as usual, I learned something too.