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[sindi keesan <keesan AT sdf.lonestar.org>]

I need to corrent something I posted - the Seagate Disk Manager does do 
more than partition. The next Seagate drive I tried to use had no 
partition table either.  DM let me 'restore MBR from backup' which took 
about a second, instead of needing to low-level format (which DM also 
does).  I then partitioned with BL2 floppy disk fdisk in another 30 sec or 
so (instead of 30 min with PQMagic).

DM will zero fill and Seagate says this destroys 100% of data.
They have an option to zero-fill just the partition table, faster.

Our local bbs is about to destroy 20 or so 2GB drives in order to destroy 
data on them and I am trying to convince them that a zero fill would take 
longer but permit the drives to be reused.  Anyone want to help by 
explaining how this works?  It would be a complete zero-fill, not just the 
partition table.  The people who made the decision are a nurse and someone 
who makes a living recording conferences for TV, and they insist that 
'wiping out the data and rewriting' will not destroy the data.  I 
understand that deleting files does not really make them unrecoverable but 
can one recover a file overwritten with zeros?

The Seagate website says zero fill takes several hours - dd took 40 min on 
3GB.  Does Seagate simply expect the drives to be larger?  Or do they do 
it differently or better?  They also said to use the Seagate zero fill 
utility for Seagate drives - will dd not accomplish the same thing?

Can I do scsi drives as of=/dev/sda if I find a scsi cable?




keesan AT sdf.lonestar.org
SDF Public Access UNIX System - http://sdf.lonestar.org