From: "John Beamish" 

When DOS was originally distributed, it wasn't simply a collection of
executibles.  There were some programs (format was one of them) that the
implementor had to complete before it could be added to the distribution.
(I'm guessing that this was because hard drive implementations and bios
interfaces weren't as standardized as they are now.)

Anyway, I remember this issue coming up because, in the case of at last one
vendor, you could recover from a reformat by tweaking a couple of bytes.
Compaq, as I recall, was the vendor.


"Frank Haber"  wrote in message
news:3e9b64b1$1{at}w3.nls.net...
> You know, I'm not dead sure the /U switch reliably formats the whole of
each
> sector any more, even for FAT.  On a floppy, certainly.  It certainly
meant
> something on FAT-16 in the DOS 3.3 era.  Even then,, there were Compaq
DOSes
> through 5.0 that did headers only, even with /U.  On NTFS, I have no idea
of
> what /U would even mean.  Has anyone ever done a forensic trace through a
> formatted MFT, etc.?  A formidable task, no?  Tony?
>
> I'd reach for a wipefile utility if it mattered.
>
>

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