I've used DBAN before, several hundred times, in fact to whip the contents of drives before sending old systems to the recycler. Unfortunately, I've never had a system do that before. DBAN's default behavior is to write "0" over each sector on it's first pass, write '1' on each sector on it's second pass, and write "0" or "1" on each sector on it's third pass. I don't know why that would prevent the bios from detecting the drive though. I'd suggest trying to flash the bios of the machine and see if it recognizes the drive with a newer "brainstem". On 1/31/06, Christopher Howard <seehow at iphouse.com> wrote: > I got ahold of an old pc that has a bunch of some one elses personal > stuff on it. I decided to wip the drive and got a utility called DBAN > off source forge. It's suposed to scrambe the contents. I used it, but > the log file said it didn't do anything, it was too short a period of > time anyways I noticed. Now the BIOS doesn't see the drive. I had a > similar problem when trying to do a low level format on an old Connor > drive. I assumed that the company that bought Connor had the formater > rigged. Some how something on the disk was changed, it's not trash, I > still want to use it. Does anyone know anything about this sort of > situation? It's a western digital caviar drive, 6.4GB. I've already > tried manualy entering in the c/h/s. The bios acts like there is no > disk hooked up. > > > _______________________________________________ > TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota > tclug-list at mn-linux.org > http://mailman.mn-linux.org/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list > -- - G. Scott Walters http://www.apt518.net