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Is there a wipeout tool for FAT32? (Users)

posted by mceric, Germany, 03.07.2024, 20:51

Hi! If you want to wipe the entire drive, it does not matter whether you have FAT16, FAT32 or other contents on it.

If you only want to wipe free space (areas not currently used by files or directories) then you do of course need something which is FAT32 aware.

What you can do as a partial solution: Fill the disk with uninteresting files (in Linux you could for example dd if=/dev/zero of=onehugefile) until there are no unused clusters left. Then at least nothing can be undeleted. This will not wipe things stored in unused areas of half-used clusters, of course.

You could also use FORMAT x: /u to wipe all files, directories and anything which could be undeleted otherwise, but it will take ages on large FAT32 drives.

Easiest would be something similar to what the Linux command dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/yourwholeharddisk would do. Sometimes things can be quite simple.

Alternatively, you could invoke the ATA security erase command to tell the disk to completely erase itself, which might be faster: https://wiki.osdev.org/ATA_Command_Matrix

Not sure which DOS tools can trigger that on IDE, ATA, SATA or other drives, though? In Linux, you can for example use hdparm to trigger a security erase.

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FreeDOS / DOSEMU2 / ...

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