Lenovo 8178, 8177 Quick and Full erase hard drive, Destructive versus non-destructive testing

channel buffer must be kept high in order to maintain a speed advantage over other data transfer modes. In order to use the UDMA channel during testing, users must disable the multitasking feature.

Destructive versus non-destructive testing:

Most of the tests found in FDAT are non-destructive. This means that PC-Doctor program will preserve any data that is present on the tested media prior to beginning any destructive operations (such as write operations). However, users can run certain tests in destructive mode (i.e. surface scan tests). Destructive tests will speed up testing because FDAT does not preserve the data on the media prior to the test beginning. Unlike non-destructive tests, any data present on the media prior to the test beginning is lost.

FDAT allows for enabling or disabling destructive tests, as well as specifying a range of destructive and non-destructive sectors on the tested drive. This is done through the configuration of the FDAT.INI. If destructive and non-destructive ranges somehow overlap, then the overlapped area is considered non-destructive. For example, if users specify both destructive and non-destructive ranges as the same, then the entire drive is tested as non-destructive.

Quick and Full erase - hard drive

The diagnostics program offers two hard drive format utilities:

vQuick Erase Hard Drive

vFull Erase Hard Drive

The Quick Erase Hard Drive provides a DOS utility that performs the following:

vDestroys the Master Boot Record (MBR) on the hard drive.

vDestroys all copies of the FAT Table on all partitions (both the master and backup).

vDestroys the partition table.

vProvides messages that warn the user that this is a non-recoverable process.

Chapter 5. Diagnostics using PC-Doctor for DOS 53