Opened 8 years ago

Last modified 8 years ago

#13033 new enhancement

DriveSetup - Add Disk Wipe (write zeros to drive)

Reported by: vidrep Owned by: stippi
Priority: low Milestone: Unscheduled
Component: Applications/DriveSetup Version: R1/Development
Keywords: Cc:
Blocked By: Blocking:
Platform: All

Description

Extend the capabilities of the Haiku Installer to be able to wipe a hard disk by writing zeros to drive in preparation for partitioning and formatting.

Change History (4)

comment:1 by humdinger, 8 years ago

See Preparing partitions point 2. Wipe Disk. Maybe wiping just the first and last blocks in enough. Possibly add an alert for the user to decide to wipe all or just first/last blocks...

comment:2 by vidrep, 8 years ago

The three common options should be to zero the MBR, drive or partition.

comment:3 by pulkomandy, 8 years ago

To be clear: normally this should not be needed. Creating a new partition table with DriveSetup should be enough.

I'm aware of two possible problems: 1) On a disk previously formatted as GPT, the old GPT data may not be erased when writing an MBR. The BIOS (or Haiku itself) may then try to use the old GPT instead of the new MBR. 2) On a disk previously formatted as BFS, there could be confusion about the block size. Basically, the BFS driver will set it to the filesystem block size (usually 2K), but the MBR driver expects it to be set to the physical sector size (usually 512 bytes).

The right thing to do is solve these two issues, to make sure the partition layout is created properly. No need to clutter the UI with workaround and hacks, which would make things even more error prone and confusing.

comment:4 by pulkomandy, 8 years ago

See #8823 for why this is sometimes needed.

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