--- Mike O'Connor  wrote:

> rallee2{at}comcast.net wrote:
> 
> >Hello
> >  Doesn't low level formatting assume a scsi drive?  Most IDE drives
> are no longer user formattable AFAIK.  Also, why would anyone
> password protect a hard drive?  Here I am assuming they mean in
> firmware which also should be unaffected by a low level format.  I
> can't help but wonder if the person assuming the hard drive is
> password protected actually means his bios is password protected
> since I can imagine little value in password protercting the
> firmware.  Also, it seems common for people to refer to their encased
> system as "the cpu" or "the hard drive" as a
generic term since they
> don't really understand the concept of a motherboard or the entire
> system as a whole.
> >Jimmy
> >
> 
> Hi Jim,
> 
> I sent the other Jim ["inkleput"] the following URL:
> 
> http://www.rockbox.org/lock.html
> 
> The reason that some people password-protect the drive in firmware is
> to 
> stop the possibly-commercially-valuable or highly personal contents 
> being readable [supposedly!] if the drive is e.g. stolen!
> 
> Disks - either IDE or SCSI aren't user-low-level-formattable. 
> Because 
> of zone-bit recording this is a factory-only option. the SCSI-LLF
> from 
> the HBA-BIOS is only a long "refresh" of the media.

I think what we now call low level formatting is using the
manufacturer's diagnostic software that will write zeros to the drive
linearly, destroying all data and partitioning structures so that the
drive is completely blank and ready to be partitioned again.

Franklin


		
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