Try to do this in Windows on a HFS+ partitioned drive and tell us what the result is.
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Does Apple test their features fully?
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Try to do this in Windows on a HFS+ partitioned drive and tell us what the result is.
No, you try it if you want to discredit what I said so much, I don't have the time for this.
Any kind of low level formatting and/or zero filling doesn't care what kind of filesystem the current partition has. You don't even have to boot into windows or whatever there are tools (often supplied by HD manufacturers) that are bootable and do that job.
theSeb and puevlo are most likely a hired posters. Say anything bad about Apple products you can be sure he will follow up with attacks that intimidate good customers like yourself who just want them to improve. Its such a simple process... they can simply format it to HFS, zero it out, THEN install OSX. Doesn't matter what file system was there before. No brainer solution. But NO. It just bugs out. Then you have people like him who comes in and blames YOU for revealing the bug, and says the problem is you. This is bad customer relations marketing. It will drive people to hate apple products because of how they treat customers.
Yes, they are members of the CIA & NSA. And i'm Barack Obama and Santa Claus in one person.
All agents, we've a security breach level 4. Please stop perving over the scanner pictures we've obtained from the lads in TSA and initiate the relocation of the president to location B451.
How does one become a paid shill anyway? We could be kajillionaires if we get a good rate for each post.
Please stay on topic, and not disrupt useful communication. Obfuscation does not mean the problem will go away by ignoring it. just like removing the guys pointing to the fire means the fire is gone.
"they can simply format it to HFS, zero it out, THEN install OSX. Doesn't matter what file system was there before. No brainer solution. But NO. It just bugs out." or as the above poster says, they can do low-level write without ntfs licensing.
No responses. Instead we are dragged into conversations about paranoia with government agencies and airport security, and even perverts over nude pics. Which, psychologically, shows one is paranoid about secret agents, and one is insecure about his nudity.
"they can simply format it to HFS, zero it out, THEN install OSX. Doesn't matter what file system was there before. No brainer solution. But NO. It just bugs out." or as the above poster says, they can do low-level write without ntfs licensing.
No responses. Instead we are dragged into conversations about paranoia with government agencies and airport security, and even perverts over nude pics. Which, psychologically, shows one is paranoid about secret agents, and one is insecure about his nudity.
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There is no official way for non-developers to report bugs. Please keep this in mind when suggesting it, otherwise it's a yearly $99 fee just to have the privilege of telling Apple about it- though that doesn't guarantee they'll actually do anything about it (I've got several long standing bugs that have been open since 10.7.0 and are still present in 10.8.2).
This is a bug.
The file system and partition table are irrelevant. When performing a secure erasure, you're basically telling the drive to go through and write zeros (or random data) to each sector of the drive until you run out of space. What was there doesn't matter because it's being overwritten; a secure erase will blow away both the partition table and file system.
This is the same thing as running `dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/diskN`, where N is the number of your disk under OS X.
The closest analogy I can come up with is this- you've got a piece of paper with undecipherable pencil markings on it. Just because you can't make sense of what the paper says doesn't mean you can't take an erasure to it or a bottle of white out. Securely erasing a disk drive is the same thing, Disk Utility shouldn't care about what was on the drive when performing a secure erase because it doesn't matter.
NTFS is a proprietary, closed source technology. It is somewhat understood outside of Microsoft, but not fully. Microsoft can and does make changes to NTFS and they don't have to tell anyone- these changes could mean that your attempts to even mount an NTFS formatted partition could blow away all your data.
A while ago (during the 10.5/10.6 days where ZFS was still on the table and Apple cared about improving things, rather then adding new shiny **** nobody needs) there was a way to forcefully enable NTFS write support under OS X. As I recall, doing so generally worked- but if you ever enabled write support on an NTFS volume containing NTFS compressed files or folders- the entire partition was lost.
Bugs like that are the reason why write support isn't enabled. Without access to Microsoft's NTFS specs or source code, nobody can truly write a 100% compatible implementation- and therefore accessing NTFS partitions outside of Windows can be dangerous.
-SC
Anyone can submit bug reports without joining the developer program.
http://www.apple.com/feedback/
Simply choose whichever product is most appropriate. On the next screen you can select "Feedback type" and change it to "Bug Report".
I have to disagree on whether this is a bug or not; maybe I would call it a missing feature. You can reformat the partition into HFS+ and then do a secure erase, so what's the problem? Can you secure erase an HFS+ partition directly from windows without a 3rd party application?
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And if you can, couldn't that also be considered a bug? Personally, I would expect the OS to make it just a bit harder to mess with a file system that it doesn't fully understand.
It doesn't seem outrageous to me to have to wipe out the partition table before you can wipe the drive.
Of course, if you already know what you are doing you can just use dd from Terminal as ScottishCaptain has pointed out.
B
When you are about to format something, you obviously decided you don't need the data on it anymore...
I don't know about you, but I've definitely formatted/partitioned my share of drives before I really intended to. This is why many of the tools have "Are you sure?" type dialog boxes, and why many quick format and partition operations can be recovered from.
I've also managed to radically confuse multi-boot systems by using Windows tools in a Windows/Linux environment. Or fallen victim the sheer idiocy of Windows trying to expand its service pack to the first logical drive in the system even though it is mounted read only.
None of this stops you from doing what you want to do if you know what the limitations are. Even with dd, you need to unmount the file system first for it to work.
B
I have low tolerance for "features" like that. I don't want my OS to question my decision every time. I almost always scream "YEAH OF COURSE I AM SURE" (on the inside) at those prompts. I want my OS to treat me like an adult and respect my decisions.
I really hated it when Leopard (I think? Correct me if I'm wrong), introduced that "this application was downloaded from the internet and could be dangerous bla bla" prompt. I really, really hated it. Those kinds of prompts is one of the reasons I really disliked Windows and it was refreshing to see so few of them in MacOS (although more are introduced in each version).
I need my OS to be efficient, not foolproof.
So maybe in the Disk Utility, there is a disclaimer up top that says, you can lose your files here if you don't know what you are doing, so proceed with caution and then lets you do whatever. I don't see how an OS taking features out for the sake of being foolproof is a good thing.
Meh. I generally want both, and OS X generally strikes a good balance there for me. [I have the same inner conversation as you, "Of course I'm sure", but sometimes it's followed by a "D'Oh! Guess I didn't really mean that. Abort! Abort!]
If I really want to sacrifice foolproof-ness for efficiency, I know I can always open Terminal and get exactly what I want done.
In all cases for this kind of low level operation, an uninformed user can royally screw things up real fast.
B
In all fairness, I had that too. The problem is that my response is so automatic, that the prompt doesn't really serve its purpose.
For example: I automatically confirm that I want to "empty my trash" even in times that I didn't want to empty my trash in hindsight.
I don't think the prompts serve the purpose the devs think they do, because after a while they condition the user to just press "yes" at the prompt (he knows is coming) without thinking about it. And the whole point of the prompts is to give you a change to think about it again. It does server its purpose for the first... say 20 times you see it?
I do agree that Mac OS strikes a fairly good balance, but I'm seeing it slowly lean towards the wrong direction recently.
hahahah
Instead of arguing I should have tested this first. It does actually work (although I didn't reformat into exFAT; I used HFS+. I can try again when I am bored). I have no idea what the OP was actually doing.
Here is a drive formatted in NTFS. So I am going to secure format it into HFS+.
Initial estimate is a bit hopeful
But then it changes to a realistic figure
ScottishCaptain was right. It's not even a missing feature.
Instead of arguing I should have tested this first. It does actually work (although I didn't reformat into exFAT; I used HFS+. I can try again when I am bored). I have no idea what the OP was actually doing.
Here is a drive formatted in NTFS. So I am going to secure format it into HFS+.
Initial estimate is a bit hopeful
But then it changes to a realistic figure
ScottishCaptain was right. It's not even a missing feature.
theSeb at it again
theSeb is at it again. You just showed my "workaround", but seems to have purposely skipped the part with the errors popping out showing it can't zero wipe with the NTFS drive. Basically, as described in my posts, you need to format it to HFS, then do the wipe/format a second time. (you see that finally at the end of the video). A lot of people will give up during the "selecting process" after seeing all the error pop up. A simple message explaining AFTER the quick format, do it AGAIN. Or the operating system can automatically do the zero right after the initial quick format. But no, it just errors out.
The problem is that if you use this NTFS drive as the main drive, how will it work? Using bootcamp for example. Because you are formatting the main drive, OSX will be gone, so it is going to install OSX immediately after right? During a restore to a NTFS drive, you would want the previous sensitive data securely wiped. How will you get the options to zero wipe before installing OSX. No workaround would then exist. How will a government agency zero wipe the NTFS drive? I was explaining that explaining the problem away, you can always explain the problems it causes.
If you have a bigger NTFS drive, how do you securely (with zero wipe) restore OSX to it as the MAIN drive? And how would bootcamp work with it?
theSeb is at it again. You just showed my "workaround", but seems to have purposely skipped the part with the errors popping out showing it can't zero wipe with the NTFS drive. Basically, as described in my posts, you need to format it to HFS, then do the wipe/format a second time. (you see that finally at the end of the video). A lot of people will give up during the "selecting process" after seeing all the error pop up. A simple message explaining AFTER the quick format, do it AGAIN. Or the operating system can automatically do the zero right after the initial quick format. But no, it just errors out.
The problem is that if you use this NTFS drive as the main drive, how will it work? Using bootcamp for example. Because you are formatting the main drive, OSX will be gone, so it is going to install OSX immediately after right? During a restore to a NTFS drive, you would want the previous sensitive data securely wiped. How will you get the options to zero wipe before installing OSX. No workaround would then exist. How will a government agency zero wipe the NTFS drive? I was explaining that explaining the problem away, you can always explain the problems it causes.
If you have a bigger NTFS drive, how do you securely (with zero wipe) restore OSX to it as the MAIN drive? And how would bootcamp work with it?
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