[Tfug] Cleaning old Windows Disks

Kramer Lee krameremark1 at gmail.com
Fri May 21 12:18:24 MST 2010


It might hide in the first 63 sectors and fdisk leaves that alone
because, in the old days, you might have EZbios installed so you could
use a larger hard drive than the BIOS limit of the machine.  You can
use dd to get rid of that if you boot from the Ubuntu CD.  You can
write zeros to your whole disk with dd.  You just have to get the
command parameters right.

Kim

On 5/19/10, Andrew Ayre <andy at britishideas.com> wrote:
> Why not keep a copy of Darik's Boot and Nuke CD handy then?
>
> Andy
>
> earljviolet at deserthowler.com wrote:
>> Mostly because I have a copy of Ubuntu 5.10 handy that I use for
>> recovering data and stuff like that.
>>
>> Earl
>>
>> On Wed, May 19, 2010 9:12 pm, Andrew Ayre wrote:
>>> Why not wipe them with Darik's Boot and Nuke then format?
>>>
>>> Andy
>>>
>>> earljviolet at deserthowler.com wrote:
>>>> One of my duties at World Care is rebuilding old Windows computers.  I
>>>> was
>>>> recently told some of these disks might have root kits that can hide
>>>> from
>>>> Windows fdisk.  I have no clue as to what hides in Windows (nor do I
>>>> really care).  I think using badblocks with -w option will clean off
>>>> everything on the disk.  Does anyone know if I am right here?
>>>>
>>>> Earl
>
> --
> Andy
> PGP Key ID: 0xDC1B5864
>
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