[Loch-Ruadh] OT: Computer techie question

Sluggy! sluggy9912 at swbell.net
Tue Apr 15 14:15:03 PDT 2008


--- Terry Sikes <tdsikes at prodigy.net> wrote:

> Oh yeah, I forgot to mention.  The BIOS on the
> computer has a hard drive test, both a short test
> and a long test (that took 55 minutes) although I
> don't know exactly what it does.  I did both tests
> (long and short) on both hard drives and they
> passed.

I hope I don't turn out to be a doomsayer, but often
those BIOS level tests, especially the ones that take
a long time, work by writing a value to every byte on
the drive and reading it, usually several times.
Often, these tests to not bother to preserve the
original value and so wipe the hard disk in the
process. 

Hopefully, if it didn't warn you that such a test
would destroy your data, maybe it didn't. :)

Robartach



---

"The idea that unicycling is intrinsically funny does not explain the findings." Professor Sam Shuster.



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