Hyperion Entertainment Message Boards

I guess we make format intelligent enough to offer it for floppy drives only

or go even further and include the likes of Zip and Sysquest drives too but to
avoid upsetting certain people probably best to avoid any absolutes

eg anything above 4GB (partition size) wont get it offered via workbench

I'm not sure if it's a good idea to remove "full format" option as some have suggested. It is still necessary for floppies (for those few that use them still) if they have been formatted using a different track encoding before and also still for harddrives if you wish to give away or sell one and don't want the other person to be able to get at the data that was stored on it previously.

Regarding latter I am aware a single full format won't stop everyone and that there is a wipe option in the format command which does seven (IIRC) full format-like passes to absolutely ensure that nothing can be recovered from the harddrive but for stopping normal people without access to special equipment the regular full format should be enough and the wipe option is a bit overkill.

FWIW other OSes do offer full format option in their GUIs and their users are smart enough not to use them, either that or they are very patient.