Wiping a harddrive totaly clean of everything...

ByteJuggler · 28 Jun 2006 at 18:25

Remember that the space listed on the drive itself, vs. by the Bios vs. various apps and Windows can differ based on how the units of measure is defined. Most manufacturers uses literal kilo-bytes and mega-bytes and giga-bytes (meaning 1000 bytes and 1,000,000 bytes and 1,000,000,000 respectively) when describing drives, whereas some/most applications & bios'es might use the binary form (e.g 2^10 for a k = 1024 bytes and 2^20 = 1048576) This gives rise to a difference in listed sizes the bigger the drive gets. A 40,000,000,000 byte disk (40GB ostensibly) will probably list as 37.25GB or so in most apps for this reason (40,000,000,000/1024/1024/1024 = 37.25GB approx). Just to confuse matters further, some vendors will use a mixture, defining a megabyte as 1000*1024... For reference, my new 320GB Seagate shows up as 298GB in use because of this discrepancy. Remember also that the actual free space after formatting will be even less as the filesystem itself also uses some space.

It has been suggested that industry use the term "kibibyte" to denote 1024=2^10 to disambiguate it from a strict kilobyte (where kilo takes its normal meaning as in "kilogram" meaning 1,000 gram), however this is not very common yet. Most people just look at you funny when you talk about a kibibyte... :rolleyes:

There are of course corresponding terms relating to millions and billions, eg. mebibyte and gibibyte.

I'd therefore hazard to guess that your drive is already clean.

FrankJH · 28 Jun 2006 at 18:25

The only thing I would look at is either putting it in a small external enclosure ( if one is available to use / borrow) and attach to a different pc and completely reformat ( not quick format)

Make sure MBR - Master Boot Record - is wiped also

Remember of course that a 40Gb drive when formatted will not actually give you 40GB of space (possibly only around 38GB)

Tough Its Now Yours --- yuckkkkkkkkkkkkkk

Also try changing bios to boot from CD / floppy / usb first and install your OS ( win 2k or XP depending on base spec of laptop) of choice and this will actually wipe the MBR for you

csd · 28 Jun 2006 at 18:35

SiriusB · 28 Jun 2006 at 19:31

A 40,000,000,000 byte disk (40GB ostensibly) will probably list as 37.25GB or so in most apps for this reason (40,000,000,000/1024/1024/1024 = 37.25GB approx)

You have the full amount available mate. You haven't lost 2GB because it isn't there to lose!

SiriusB

utherpendragon · 28 Jun 2006 at 19:44

As said hard drive manufactuers are evil and say that 1000MB = 1GB, whilst in reality 1GB = 1024MB

csd · 28 Jun 2006 at 20:10

ByteJuggler · 29 Jun 2006 at 14:25

csd said:
I am 100% sure its keeping the image on the harddrive in an unpartition.

The capacity of the drive in windows is 37,893,828,608.

I have the same harddrive in my own laptop it its just short of 40 GB.

Not to worry, was just going to free up the 2gb image.

Well, use one of the manufacturers disk reformatting utilities then to be sure... no hidden paritoin will survive that as those tools don't operate based on partitions.

csd · 29 Jun 2006 at 15:50

Vertigo · 30 Jun 2006 at 07:41

ByteJuggler said:
It has been suggested that industry use the term "kibibyte" to denote 1024=2^10 to disambiguate it from a strict kilobyte (where kilo takes its normal meaning as in "kilogram" meaning 1,000 gram), however this is not very common yet. Most people just look at you funny when you talk about a kibibyte... There are of course corresponding terms relating to millions and billions, eg. mebibyte and gibibyte.

These stupid terms should be resisted at all costs. Regardless of the usage of the prefixes kilo, mega and giga in other areas, the fact remains that, in the computer field, a kilobyte, megabyte & gigabyte have always referred to the binary values of 2^10, 2^20 ^ 2^30 respectively. It annoys me that, simply because the hard drive manufacturers were looking for a way to make their drives sound larger, they decided to redefine these accepted terms and we thus have all this confusion. Trying to then introduce new terms to represent the binary-based values is pure madless and I can't believe anyone thought it would take off. Whenever I see kibibyte, mibibyte or gibibyte used it just irritates me.

When you buy a gigabyte of memory it's 2^30 bytes, not 10^9. Windows calculates disk and disk sizes using the proper binary methods. Why should hard drives be any different?