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From: farren@hoptoad.uucp (Mike Farren)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: UNFORMATTING formated PC floppies
Message-ID: <2148@hoptoad.uucp>
Date: Tue, 19-May-87 06:18:50 EDT
Article-I.D.: hoptoad.2148
Posted: Tue May 19 06:18:50 1987
Date-Received: Wed, 20-May-87 04:56:59 EDT
References: <4327@nsc.nsc.com> <3156@ecsvax.UUCP> <231@grinch.grinch.UUCP>
Reply-To: farren@hoptoad.UUCP (Mike Farren)
Organization: Nebula Consultants in San Francisco
Lines: 25

In article <231@grinch.grinch.UUCP> luis@grinch.UUCP (Luis Chanu) writes:
>
>I have to dis-agree with you John.  I have used Mace Utilities, and it
>can recover a formatted diskette (hard or soft).  I am not exactly sure
>how it does it, but I have heard (don't know if true) that when you format
>a disk, that you are only wiping the fat table, and re-writing the sector
>ID's.

To the best of my knowledge (and I think my knowledge is fairly
complete), when you execute the FORMAT program to re-format your
floppy disks, it does a hard format of the disk - that is, it
re-writes the entire track, erasing anything, sector IDs, gaps, and
data alike, that was there before.  There is no way I know of to
program the 765 controller chip to rewrite sector IDs.  A hard disk,
on the other hand, does not do a hard reformat when you run FORMAT.

If anyone can verify that the Mace utilities can, indeed, recover data
from a floppy which has been reformatted using the FORMAT command,
please let me know - I want to know how they can do it!

-- 
----------------
                 "... if the church put in half the time on covetousness
Mike Farren      that it does on lust, this would be a better world ..."
hoptoad!farren       Garrison Keillor, "Lake Wobegon Days"