Apple HD SC Setup, is Initialize = Zero?

[l008com]

I'm trying to erase these old PowerBook 500 drives I have. I want to zero them before I get rid of them, like I always do with modern drives. But these are a little trickier, the only way I can format them is by booting this old PowerBook off of a floppy. So I can't get Drive Setup available to me, I can only use Apple HD SC Setup. It has an initialize option that is very slow. But I'm trying to confirm for sure that it is zero'ing a drive when you "initialize" it? If it's just doing a reformat without zeroing, I'll have to find another way to erase these guys. 

 

[Cory5412]

It will do a reformat without writing zeros to the drive. I don't believe Apple's own software before OS X is capable of doing that.

You'll either need to put the disks in something like a mechanical degausser or use third party software to write zeros or other random patterns to the disk. Unfortunately, I do not know the names of any software that will do that off hand.

 

[Gorgonops]

Do note that a drive degausser totally destroys the hard disk you're degaussing, so obviously that's not an option if you're planning to sell the drives. It would be sort of a shame to kill those rare 2.5" SCSI units if they work.

 

[l008com]

Well then I guess I'll just "zero" the drive the old fashioned way:

Reformat, install clean OS, copy over a system updater that JUST fits in the free space remaining on the drive.

 

[Scott Baret]

I'll have to check my copy of Silverlining 5.5 to see if it allows for that. I know it has a lot of custom settings for formats, but I'm not positive about zeroing...

 

[Cory5412]

I wasn't aware that a degausser would make a disk that unusable, so that's defintiely worth being aware of.

It would be easy if you had a PC with like an Adaptec 2940 or whatever, you could just hook up your old mac disks and dban them, although if you're comfortable with just rewriting the disk to full a few times then that will of course be an easy but time consuming solution.

 

[Byrd]

Lido does low level formatting, but get ready for hours of formatting and possibly finding errors a normal format may have ignored (bad blocks etc).  It's not the same as zero-ing a drive, it's a compromise.

 

[Gorgonops]

I wasn't aware that a degausser would make a disk that unusable, so that's defintiely worth being aware of.

They are genuinely scary pieces of hardware. (We used to have one in the data center to destroy drives with customer-private data on them when they failed.) They generate an electrical field strong enough to make the innards of the drives *rattle*, and the whole mess gets hot to the touch.

Even if there were no physical damage to the drive mechanism or electronics after that basically all hard drives made after 1990 or so depend on embedded servo information (IE, special data written either to one whole side of one platter, or interspersed with the "user" format on the data surfaces) for positioning their heads, and that gets blown away with everything else. The only way to possibly reuse a drive subjected to one would be to reconstruct that data with a servowriter, and I'm not sure even Drivesavers has the equipment to do it.

 

[Gorgonops]

... you know, thinking about the topic of degaussing, that does raise some interesting questions about the future of getting used computers at government surplus sales and the like. Generally speaking when you get computers from such venues they've had their HDs removed to be properly disposed of. (Which can be annoying when the proprietary caddy/drawer thing is lost along with it, which is all too often.) Now that companies like Apple are starting to weld their SSDs to the motherboard, well... I guess you won't be buying those surplus anymore, given the alternative most commonly sited for destroying SSDs is physical shredding.

 

[techknight]

Drive Setup will Zero the drive, and it runs fine on 68K hardware. I did it all the time. You have to go into advanced settings and check the box Zero the drive. 

 

[l008com]

But Drive Setup won't fit on my boot floppy. This mac has no optical and I have no external drive that will work with it. 

 

[rsolberg]

I was just installing Mac OS 8.1 today and noticed there's a directory on the CD to make a "Disk Tools" 2 disk floppy set.

 

[l008com]

How would a 2-disk floppy set work when the computer only has one drive, and you're not installing anything on the hard drive?

Also I just sold this 160 MB drive on ebay for $50. That's more than the whole computer would get! Yikes. 

 

[rsolberg]

I double checked on my 8.1 CD. One disk is 68k, the other is PPC. The 68k disk should be all you need.

 

[l008com]

I have the disk tools floppies that came with my retail 8.0 CD, but they dont' have drive setup on them, they have HD SC setup.

 

[Gorgonops]

If you have another system with a SCSI disk port an obvious solution would be to use SCSI target disk mode to wipe the drive with whatever software you care to use, but for that you of course need the *special* HDI-30 adapter cable. If you don't already have one it'll probably be heck to find one.

 

[l008com]

Yeah I'm not going through all that trouble. Like I said I just ended up doing a clean 7.6. install and then filling the drive with system updates. Oh well. 

 

[l008com]

If only these older Macs could NetBoot

 

[Gorgonops]

Well, there is the System 7.5 Network Access Disk, if you have an Appleshare server set up *might* you be able to boot with that floppy and run some sort of blanking tool stored on the server?