What are the Hard Disk Wipe and Zap Utilities?
In 1996, IBM created two excellent utilities called Wipe and Zap. ZAP writes the first 128 logical blocks of the drive with 00h pattern, starting at Cylinder 0, Head 0, Sector 1. This will very quickly wipe the FAT and boot sector, often necessary since Dos’s Fdisk struggles ‘seeing’ non-dos partition types WIPE writes the COMPLETE drive with 00h pattern, starting at Cylinder 0, Head 0, Sector 1 and ending with Max Cylinder, Max Head, and Max Sector. As I understand it, WIPE suffers from the old 8 GB barrier meaning it will write zeros up to only 8GB We’ve left Wipe on this page and in the download for completeness March 27 2007 – Daniel B.
