General Discussions

**thes-47** · 03-25-2007, 11:14 PM

Hi, I would need help, seriously.

I would like to format my hardrive,
western digital, laptop. There is a hacker in this drive, using remote
assistance software. He is in partition, "0" using fat 12 partition. He
is about 2 gigs strong. I have tried, with all kinds of software, to
format, "white canyon" "norton" "Iolux"... and I am not able to
format

him out. I can see his programming. The software, will
format everything else, but not partition "0". This is making my life
difficult, because he can see, everything I am doing.

**chrishirst** · 03-26-2007, 07:20 PM

fdisk the drive or get a replacement put in

**tripy** · 03-26-2007, 08:02 PM

???
Is this a joke ?

Seriously, a 2 Gig partition 0 in fat 12 ?
Fat12 partitions are bound to a 32Mo maximum size.

I should say, where...
They where introduced in 1977, fat12 is dead, long life to fat32...

Quote:

FAT12

This initial version of FAT is now referred to as FAT12. As a filesystem for disks, it had a number of limitations: no support for hierarchical directories, cluster addresses were "only" 12 bits long (which limited cluster count to 4096 and made the FAT code manipulating a bit tricky) and the disk size was stored as a 16-bit count of sectors, which limited the size to 32 MiB. An entry-level floppy diskette at the time was 5.25", single-sided, 40 tracks, with 8 sectors per track, resulting in a capacity of slightly less than 160 KiB. The above limits exceeded this capacity by one or more orders of magnitude and at the same time allowed all the control structures to fit inside the first track, thus avoiding head movement during read and write operations. The limits were successively lifted in the following years, which improved wait-loss dramatically.
Since the entire root directory had to fit inside the first track as well, the maximum possible number of files was limited to a few dozen.
A limitation which was not addressed until much later was that any bad sector in the control structures area, track 0, could prevent the diskette from being usable. The DOS formatting tool rejected such diskettes completely. Bad sectors were only allowed in the file area, where they made the entire holding cluster unusable as well.

**colbyt** · 03-26-2007, 08:10 PM

fdisk:
Delete all active partions.
exit
fdisk /mbr
reboot
fdisk:
Create primary partion.
reboot
format c:
Nothing is left there at this point in time.

**chrishirst** · 03-27-2007, 02:54 AM

to Suzanne

I guess your machine is a Packard Bell or HP/Compaq or similar

Some of these machines are supplied with a 2 gig partition that is reported by Windows as being formatted with FAT12.

It holds the drive/machine diagnostics and restore utilities.