1. What are the Hard Disk Wipe and Zap Utilities?
In 1996, IBM created two excellent utilities called Wipe and Zap.
ZAP writes the first 128 logical blocks of the drive with 00h pattern,
starting at Cylinder 0, Head 0, Sector 1.
This will very quickly wipe the FAT and boot sector, often necessary
since Dos's Fdisk struggles 'seeing' non-dos partition types
WIPE writes the COMPLETE drive with 00h pattern, starting at Cylinder
0, Head 0, Sector 1 and ending with Max Cylinder, Max Head, and Max
Sector.
As I understand it, WIPE suffers from the old
8 GB barrier
meaning it will write zeros up to only 8GB
We've left Wipe on this page and in the download for completeness
March 27 2007 - Daniel B. Sedory (aka, TheStarman)
informed me of his zap and wipe utilities
His zap utility is less dangerous than IBM's zap
More information about this
here
2. Why did you create this page?
I've used these tools many times in the past
At one time I was searching for the IBM Zap and Wipe tools but I could
not find them
This page was originally a location for links to the IBM Zap and Wipe
tools
Since I've become aware of Daniel's Zap and Wipe utilities, I no longer
use the IBM utilities
3. I'd like to download some Hard Disk Zap and
Wipe
utilities
Daniel's excellent Zap and Wipe utilities make
the IBM tools redundant and as a result, I have chosen to no longer
host it
More information about this
here
4. Another method
with a Dos Debug script
Rad of
http://radified.com/
was kind enough to inform me that he was creating links to this page
He made me aware of some
Debug routines
that can accomplish the wiping of the MBR
I took this information and created a simple batch file and disk image
using debug under
FreeDOS
Simply download this
disk
image, decompress it and use Winimage/Rawrite or equivalent to
create a floppy disk
Boot from the disk and type clean
This will call a debug script to write zero's to sector 1 of the
primary master ide drive
There is no user interaction so please be very very carefull and aware
of what you are doing
By the way, if you are interested on how I got a 1.44 MB floppy
disk image to be a 213KB zip file ...
Don't do a quick format of your floppies as it will leave old data
behind that will become part of your disk image
Under Dos, a full format (unconditional) will overwrite most of floppy
with hex F6
Since the floppy is full of repeated F6's, this will compress very well
I personally like to write zero's to the entire disk using DD under
Linux/Unix/Cygwin ...
Try this;
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/fd0
Your floppy is full of zero's now
I then format the floppy, copy the system files, copy debug, a
few text files and the floppy is done
The actual valid data on the floppy was about 263KB
The rest of the floppy was zero's and thus compresses quite well
Cool eh !
5. The Starman's Zap and Wipe utilities
Daniel B. Sedory (aka, TheStarman) informed me of his zap and wipe
utilities
The readme of his Zap tool explains it all
"ZAP63 was written because: The original ZAP would 'zero-out' 128
sectors; that would not only include any OS Boot Record of the
first
partition, but also a portion of the 1st FAT (File Allocation
Table)
if it had a FAT filesystem. If you made the mistake of 'zapping'
the
wrong drive using the original program, you'd have to hope its backup
copy was still intact and re-create the 1st FAT from that copy; or
lose the whole filesystem structure, and likely some data too!
Considering that program too dangerous, we created ZAP63 as a
safer
alternative: By limiting the 'sector wipes' to 63 sectors,
it will
still 'zero-out' the MBR (Master Boot Record) and any Boot Managers,
Overlays or even Boot Viruses that often reside between the MBR
and
the first OS Boot Record, but still makes it possibile for all
partitions on the hard disk to be easily recovered.
Since version 1.3, ZAP63 is even "safer" (since a 'YES' must be
entered before it will 'zap' your hard disk's first track)."
I'm quite impressed with these tools and with Daniel's permission have
them available for you
here
Please be very very carefull as these are very powerfull
utilities
I will not be held responsible for any accidentally deleted information
from use of this utility
6. Do I have to have fun?
Yes, having fun is mandatory
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If you find an error or wish to comment please let me know.