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Re: Formatting Hard-drives and Recovery

On Sat, 30 Jul 2005 08:04:08 +0100
Roy Schestowitz <newsgroups@schestowitz.com> wrote:

> Kevin Nathan wrote:
> 
> > I once wrote an assembler routine to wipe the bubble memory (and/or
> > hard drives) for a military group back when I was still in the
> > Navy. I was never told if it was used, or not, but it took eight
> > hours on a 5 MB hard drive. Since I never actually had access to
> > the boxes with bubble memory, I have no idea how long it took to
> > run on them, but 640KB of main memory took about 20 minutes
> > (4.77MHz clock on an 8088) . . . ;-)
> 
> 
> Judging by the size of the main memory, the machines were probably
> 386 

Nope, it was an 8088 as I stated. ;-) It had a 10MB hard drive (5 1/4
inch, full bay height!) and a 5MB plugin HardCard.


> with or without a hard-drive which contained no more than 400 MB
> of data. 

No, again. It was tested on a 5MB hard drive -- 20MB drives were just
coming out . . .


> So, I guess your algorithm was sufficiently useful. *smile*
> 

If I remember correctly, I wrote all zeroes, then all ones, then all
zeroes again and then wrote out a walking bit pattern sixteen times
(to cycle the pattern twice) and a two bit walk, three bit walk, all
ones, all zeroes, all ones and finished with the bog-standard F6 (0366
octal) . . .
 

> Anon1: What do you do for a living?
> 
> Anon2: I build houses for people.
> 
> Anon1: And what do _you_ do for a living?
> 
> Anon3: I demolish houses.
> 
> Anon1: Kevin, what did _you_ do for a living?
> 
> Kevin: I help people destroy data.
> 
> Just a joke anyway...
> 

I thought it was cute! ;-)


-- 
Kevin Nathan (Arizona, USA)  
Linux Potpourri and a.o.l.s. FAQ -- http://www.project54.com/linux/

Open standards. Open source. Open minds. 
The command line is the front line.
Linux 2.6.8-24.16-default
  4:57pm  up 27 days  1:47,  13 users,  load average: 0.02, 0.07, 0.08

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