1. Fdisk dilemma 2. Wiping util needed

[BrickHouse]

1. Fdisk dilemma:
I needed to wipe a hard drive and I booted up to dos and ran fdisk. I viewed partition info and there was an extended partition with logical drives defined (apparently). It then prompted if I would like to see the logical drive info and I chose yes. It went directly to a screen that said no logical partitions were defined!?! So, I tried to delete the partitions, but could not delete the extended partition because *a logical drive existed* and could not delete a logical drive because *one was not defined*. See the dilemma? I eventually got around this by booting with NT cdrom (not the OS I wanted) and deleted the partitions from there, but I was still wondering if there was a way around this, if NT was not available. I tried fdisk /mbr (in case, luckily, that would have helped) and I also formated c: (not thinking any of that would work) Lemme know if somebody knows why this happened and how to get around it.

2. Disk wiping util:
Now this drive needs to be wiped according to DoD standards, with a freeware program, and if this program was bootable, that would probably be the best (only?) way to securly wipe the drive. I saw a post sometime somewhere that had a link to a govt site with a prog like this, but cannot find it again.

Thanks for the help

 

[techietam]

What's the brand of the drive?

 

[foofoo]

hi,
for individual files, try
eraser
for a whole disk, there might be a free proggie that i dont know of. but you can
download the manufacturers disk software that will overwrite the whole disk and do it 7 times

 

[Tal]

I'm interested in the answer to #2, but as far as #1, I've used DelPart to quickly remove partitions that are being a pain. You can find a copy here. -TAL 😛

 

[GroundZero]

wipe
here is a wipe utility
you might also try the wipe utility from norton

 

[Zepper]

Wipe utilities: Go to C-Net's DL site (www.download.com) > click on Utilities > click on Security. Search on erase and/or wipe. I quickly found a half-dozen programs that would work.
.bh.
😎

 

[dbwillis]

For part #1, Ive had the same problem with some partitions, I assume they were created within NT? thats where my problem came from, i had to put the drive in another PC, then delete the partitions from within the other PC/OS.

 

[mroleg]

for #1 you have to get a version of fdisk that supports NT partition. older verions don't recognize nt partitions on the drives.