11 Professional

 Fill each erased sector with 0xAA value. Finally, the target data area is to be verified.

Military and government standards always require 100 percent residual data verification. It

is necessary to make sure that the operation has been properly accomplished. Besides

corrupted sectors discovered during the operation are to be logged to keep the user

informed, since these sectors may contain classified information.

The list of supported military and government standards may vary for your product.

Anyway you’ve always got the possibility to create a customized algorithm, defining up to 4

wiping patterns, number of passes for each wiping pattern and for the group of patterns,

thus providing the maximum possible security level.

Dynamic Disks

As you probably know, MS-DOS, Microsoft Windows 95/98/Me/NT/2000/XP/Vista/Server 2003/2008 support four

primary partitions per physical hard disk, one of which can be extended. Certainly there is the possibility to create

logical drives within the extended partition. Such types of disks are called basic. Windows XP Professional, Windows

2000, Windows Vista and Windows Server 2003/2008 follow the same strategy: You can have a maximum of four

primary partitions, one of which can be an extended partition with logical drives. However, these operating systems also

introduce a new disk configuration type - dynamic disk - which must be understood to effectively configure and manage

hard disks.

Dynamic disk is a physical disk that doesn't use partitions or logical drives. Instead, it contains only dynamic volumes.

Regardless of what format you use for the file system, only Win2K computers can access dynamic volumes directly.

However, computers that aren't running Win2K can access the dynamic volumes remotely when connected to the

shared folders over the network.

Dynamic disks can co-exist on a system with basic disks. The only limitation is that you cannot mix Basic and Dynamic

disks on the same hard drive.

There are five types of dynamic volumes: simple (uses free space from a single disk), spanned (created from free disk

space that is linked together from multiple disks), striped (a volume the data of which is interleaved across two or more

physical disks), mirrored (a fault-tolerant volume the data of which is duplicated on two physical disks, and RAID-5

volumes (a fault-tolerant volume the data of which is striped across an array of three or more disks).

With dynamic storage, you can perform disk and volume management without the need to restart Windows.

Limitations:

 Dynamic disks are not supported on portable computers.

 Dynamic disks are not supported on Windows XP Home Edition-based computers.

 You cannot create mirrored volumes or RAID-5 volumes on Windows XP Home Edition, Windows XP

Professional, or Windows XP 64-Bit Edition-based computers.

Thus, the dynamic disk is a new way of looking at hard disk configuration. Dynamic disks offer you more management

flexibility without the partition limitation of basic disks. Dynamic disks can contain an unlimited number of volumes, but

they cannot contain partitions or logical drives. Dynamic storage can be particularly beneficial for large-scale businesses

when dealing with many physical hard disks involving complex setup.