Unable to activate 'Clear' button in DD 10
Currently 'Wiping' 500GB HD with Disk Director 10 but I wanted to use the 'Clear the current Hard Disk Drive' command.
I deleted the partition & this allowed me to use the 'Wipe' command but not the 'Clear'
What enables the 'Clear' command to be used?
I have read User Guide but all it says is to select the Hard Disk on the 'Tree' view & if this Tree view is not shown, go to View menu & select 'Tree View' !!! There is no Tree View in this menu. Does it mean 'Details'? Why are these manuals written by dyslectics.
Well thank you Kolo, impressively quick answer.
Just been back through the User Guide but cannot find where it explains this. 130 pages & not a decent description of how to access all the commands in the main window interface.
So I have now Wiped the disk - does this do every single sector or should I have used 'Clear'. There are blocks / sectors installed by Raid software that formatting with Windows OS does not get rid of. Saying that, what is the difference between Wipe & Clear?
To all casual users like me, I think the Acronis DD & TI are great programmes its just the instructions that are rubbish. I had to teach myself TI by trial & error because the Help & Guides don't explain disk & OS relationships properly & when you go on the TI forums they take the piss or don't answer if you ask a simple question.
Wipe refers to deleting the contents of a partition by writing a pattern to the partition, ending with the pattern 00. After wiping a partition it should consist of all zeros except for the first sector of the partition, where there is information about the partition's format and structure.
Clear refers to wiping an entire disk including all partitions. After this operation finishes the disk should contain only 00.
In my experiments with DD, after doing a Clear operation only sector 0 had something other than 00 in it. Sector 0 contained the 4-byte Disk Signature and the 2-byte Boot Record Signature AA 55 at the end of sector 0. I do not know if DD leaves the Disk Signature in place or if the PC BIOS puts it there.
A Clear will only Wipe the drive if you select that option (Delete partitions and destroy data.). Otherwise, only the partitions are removed.
You can only use the Wipe feature on unallocated space.
After a standard Clear, the MBR still contains the MBR code. I don't know about a Clear+Wipe because I don't do it that way (takes too long). I usually just do a Clear, start a Wipe, cancel it and then zero-out the MBR.
Thanks again Kolo
Finished Wiping used DD to Format as 1 partition NTFS & looked at Properties of HD in Windows. This shows 465GB free & 78.9MB used.
78.9MB seems a lot of used space for Boot Sector etc. Is it used by the Disk itself or protected from Wipe or am I not getting the whole disk cleared?
Thanks MudCrab, understood. I did do a Wipe & it took 3 hours. Know better next time.
Not sure I understand how you 'zero-out the MBR'.
If you really want to wipe the entire drive it will take a long time. I usually don't care and just want to do a quick "clear & wipe" of the drive (delete existing partitions and wipe the start).
See this post in the old forum for how to zero-out the MBR using DD.
While you're in the editor and view in hex mode, you can scroll through the sectors and verify if they've all been wiped.
...78.9MB seems a lot of used space for Boot Sector etc. Is it used by the Disk itself or protected from Wipe or am I not getting the whole disk cleared?
This space is used by the NTFS file system to keep track of the files on the partition. Most is reserved for the Master File Table (MFT).
Thanks guys
resolved all my queries. I had forgot about the NTFS allocating space for the MFT.
Good post for editing the MBR.
Good forum.