Destructive Windows Script

[Robert Kern]

rbt wrote:
> Chris Lambacher wrote:
> 
>>The reason they are slow and tedious is that they need to write to
>>every byte on the disk.  Depending on the size of the disk, there may
>>be a lot of data that needs to be written, and if they are older
>>computers, write speed may not be particularly fast.
> 
> OK, I accept that, but if you have a HDD that's 8GB total and it has 1GB 
> of files, why must every byte be written to? Why not just overwrite the 
> used portion?

Because sometime in the past, you may have had 8 GB of data on there. 
There's no reliable way to know which bytes have been used and which 
haven't.

This is a case where "doing it properly" means "slow."

-- 
Robert Kern
rkern at ucsd.edu

"In the fields of hell where the grass grows high
  Are the graves of dreams allowed to die."
   -- Richard Harter