I have some HD's that i am going to be getting rid of but I want to make sure that no one else who gets them can retrieve any info off them using unformat (I reformatted them with DOS 6.22) If i do a "Format C: /u" will that leave the disk still usable just without the unformat info? Thanks -Shannon

Format C: /u will leave all of the data on the drives intact, but not visible. Rather like removing the adress number from a house: only confuses folks new to the neighborhood. Use Scorch from Real Delete Home Page to completely erase the drives. Scorch is free and can be run from a boot disk, DOS prompt or Windows. Please read the Scorch doc file before using.

If you have FORMAT.COM from MS-DOS 4.00 or PC-DOS 4.01, you can use it with 6.22 by using the SETVER command in the config.sys. This format erases everything. The IBM sight has a download that writes zeros to the drive and then deletes them. This writes over your data. (I think the name of the program is ERASE.EXE, but I am not completely sure.) Unless the data was very personal FORMAT /u will keep it away from most people. OR do this: XCOPY an entire drive full of data from CD-ROMs or somewhere to the HD. Then use 6.22 FORMAT /u.

All any version of Format does is remove the data address folders. It's kind of like suspending the data in aspic and makes the job of recovery actually easier. Writing zero's isn't much help either as you would have to write hundreds of layers to remove the data permanently. Scorch or Sami Tolvanen's Eraser 5.1 will write 35 layers of heavily encrypted data to the drive. All other data is very, very gone. As part of my job for many years, I regularly recovered hard drives. Recovering data that hasn't been erased with encrypted data is surprisingly easy with tools that are commonly available these days and recovering data six layers deep is almost trivial. A last note: It's really hard to remember if you wrote your credit card number or other important personal data to a document 6 months. a year or two years ago. There are crooks who buy secondhand drives for the sole reason of trying to recover such data. They are very good at it.

FORMAT /U does wipe the disk clean. But I would use a disk wiper as well such as BCWIPE or other hard disks utilities found at powerload. (Link above) which will leave your drive 'Factory Fresh'

formated by mistake the drive in win98 system(fat32). want to recover the data if easily possible. thanks