In a message dated 95-10-09 22:07:18 EDT, you write:

Archive data off to tape, low level format drive using the bios hd utils, reformat drive, restore data. I find the non graphical AMI bios very useful for this.

Doing anything else fails to remove the old data on partially used but valid blocks.

Why do people insist this is the case? ABsolutely not true under MS-DOS. I haven't personally verified under a VxD file system (like 32bit disk access) but ask yourself: if I expand (by appending new garbage data) the current file to the next allocation-unit boundary, will that overwrite the tail blocks of the current file???? Folks: it's sooooo easy.