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From: madd@bucsb.bu.edu.UUCP (Jim "Jack" Frost)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: UNFORMATTING formated PC floppies
Message-ID: <970@bucsb.bu.edu.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 19-May-87 12:37:36 EDT
Article-I.D.: bucsb.970
Posted: Tue May 19 12:37:36 1987
Date-Received: Wed, 20-May-87 05:33:06 EDT
References: <4327@nsc.nsc.com> <3156@ecsvax.UUCP> <231@grinch.grinch.UUCP>
Reply-To: madd@bucsb.bu.edu.UUCP (Jim "Jack" Frost)
Organization: ODO (Organization for the Disorganization of Organization)
Lines: 43
Summary: I don't believe it...

In article <231@grinch.grinch.UUCP> luis@grinch.UUCP (Luis Chanu) writes:
>In article <3156@ecsvax.UUCP> phco@ecsvax.UUCP (John Miller) writes:
>>You're out of luck.  Files that have been deleted can frequently be
>>restored by programs such as Norton's Utilities or PC-Tools, but formatting
>>destroys all data on a disk.
>
>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...

I can't believe this.  Sure on a hard drive, format doesn't physically
reformat the disk.  It just fixes up the FATs and things.  However,
floppies are physically reformatted EVERY TIME.  There are a lot of
reasons why, and I wouldn't even be surprised to find out that one of
them was IBM wanting better security.

It's theoretically possible to recover information on a physically
reformatted floppy.  There will be traces of the information that
had been on the floppy earlier.  However, the drives used on every PC
I've ever seen aren't NEARLY good enough to pick them up, and if they
were, it would cause severe problems (like reading old data through
the new data you've just written).

>Anyway, all I know is that Mace Utilities does have an UN-FORMAT
>feature.. Just thought you might like to know...  If for some reason or 
>another the info above is out of date, or incorrect, I am sorry.. but, that 
>is what they advertize.  I have Mace, but have not had the need to use 
>Un-Format.

I believe they have that kind of utility.  But only for a hard disk.
The only other way they could do it would be to replace the format
program supplied with MS-DOS with their own, which doesn't actually do
a physical format every time, but instead looks to see if the disk had
been previously formatted and only clears the information if it had
been formatted.

%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
          Jim Frost * The Madd Hacker | UUCP: ..!harvard!bu-cs!bucsb!madd
  H H                                 | ARPA:           madd@bucsb.bu.edu
H-C-C-OH <- heehee          +---------+----------------------------------
  H H                       | "We are strangers in a world we never made"