From: "John Beamish" 

I've been thinking about this and I went and checked some really old stuff
(even found something on the net).  Compaq wrote an unrecoverable format
(i.e., they wrote something -- hex00?) all over the disk.  It was the
others who simply updated some bytes.



"John Beamish"  wrote in message
news:3e9c44cb$1{at}w3.nls.net...
> 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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