I.T., Old School

I used to format HDDs all of the time. Well, it seemed like it- I could practically do a WinXP install in my sleep (and probably did, at least once). I have a few neat tools I like to use to do this dirty work. One is called Darik's Boot and Nuke and the other is Ubuntu- pretty much any Ubuntu (or, for that matter, any Linux distro) should do the trick. The first is of no use to me, as I think it's pretty much for taking out internal drives. Ubuntu would do the trick, but I honestly have a bit of a mess in the office and those CDs are buried somewhere! So, I did what any old self-respecting geek would do... that's right, Robin, to the DOS prompt! It took me a couple of tries, but I finally got the format going; its been such a long time since I last did this that I had to check the syntax on the internet!

In the last blog, I mentioned I was manually transferring files and deleting as I went along. We've had this drive for a few years- its a 1TB WD Passport, and it had worked fine up until a few months ago. I had suspected for some time that we had some kludged up data on the drive,  but never really tried to hunt it down. Well, when I finished getting all of the data off of the old drive, I had four folders left that had been created by WD's backup software. During scheduled backups, a bad file had been copied and wouldn't let me delete these folders. So tonight, I finished the job.

I opened up My Computer, selected the drive and hit "FORMAT". The PC thought about this momentarily, then said that the drive was in use and close down whatever applications were open, yada, yada, yada. Nothing else was open. So, goto DOS. Command prompt. Check syntax. ALL DATA WILL BE LOST. Yes! Yes! Yes!

No. What?

"Format cannot run because the volume is in use by another process.Format may run if this volume is dismounted first."

I'm not sure I'd ever seen that message before. Wow- you can teach an old dog new tricks.

"Would you like to force a dismount on this volume? <Y/N>"

I'd like to buy a vowel... Y.

So now, we have a bare hard drive, which our son claimed already.

In database news, a little progress has been made from the last time I talked about it. The Songs table is slowly getting populated, and the Music Albums table received a redesign and its first record. There are only a little over 500 new pieces of data that have been added in three months, so there's clearly still a great deal of work ahead on this project.