Atari 8-bit SpartaDOS Project

SpartaDOS 3 and X

Utility: WIPEDISK.COM

What it does

WipeDisk wipe's the entire disk or the unused sectors of a disk (default).

Note: WipeDisk is part of a suite of programs written for security purposes for the Atari 8-bit computers back in the late 80s. Today WipeDisk remains a great utility. I use it to wipe the unused sectors of my SIO2PC .atr and .xfd virtual Atari 8-bit disks before I ZIP them. The resulting compressed files are much smaller than if I hadn't used WipeDisk.

Before using

Always use CleanUp, from the FTE toolkit, before you use WipeDisk on your disks!

WipeDisk will start the wipe process by reading the disks entire tree and wiping all deleted directory entries (files). This is due to the fact that WipeDisk wipes all unused sectors including unused sector-maps, trying to unerase any files after a wipe will make no sense.

Wiped directory entries should never be UnErased! Use my UnDelete command whenever you have to recover files. It bypasses wiped directory entries and it is 100% reliable (read the SpartaDOS Unerase bug report [bugs.txt] included in the DualTest.Arc file).

When to use it

Use WipeDisk to wipe confidential data from your disks or your hard-drive partitions or to wipe unused sectors from .atr and .xfd virtual Atari 8-bit disks prior to compressing them.

WipeDisk allows you to specify:

What ASCII value (or character) to wipe the disk with.
Specify the number of times to repeat the wipe process.
Wipe the entire disk (starting at sector 4) or the unused sectors of a disk (default).

Command-line switches:

/E		Wipe an entire disk starting at sector 4. You will then need to either reformat the disk or use SpartaDOS X's format or Ed Bachman's P_Format command to rebuild the directory. Note that WipeDisk will not warn you that it will wipe the entire disk or hard-drive partition! Be careful!
/Rn		Repeat the number of times you want WipeDisk to write over the sectors with the specified ASCII value (repeat values are: 1 to 254).
/Vn		The ASCII value to wipe sectors with (ASCII values from 0 to 255).

To obtain a complete list of command-line switches, as well as in the event you may have acquired an updated version, type WipeDisk[return] at the command-line for syntax.

Download WipeDisk