full-disclosure - Erasing a hard disk easily

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From: avalon at cairo.anu.edu.au (Darren Reed)
Subject: Erasing a hard disk easily

In some mail from Gary E. Miller, sie said:
> On Wed, 14 Jul 2004, Darren Reed wrote:
> 
> > Too bad the pc Unixes don't have a format command like Sun has had
> > for Solaris/SunOS....tells the hard drive to 'format' and then tests
> > with a number of test patterns.
> 
> You can not really force a low level format of an IDE or SCSI drive.  The
> drive that appears to the OS is not the real drive, but a virtual drive
> managed by the disk electronics.
> 
> The most you can do is ask the drive to format itself.  Some do a good job
> and some do not.  The ones that return in seconds did not and the ones that
> takes hours are doing better.

Have you ever actually used format on Solaris to format a SCSI disk ?

It's somewhat similar, I believe, to "scsictl /dev/sd0a format" on NetBSD.

I ask because your comments here make it seem like you have not...and the
lack of that experience shows in the rest of your comments, too...

Darren