oops, no partition table

[gboyce-qL0WqcyiFk9Wk0Htik3J/w at public.gmane.org (Gregory Boyce)]

On Thu, 23 Oct 2008, Matthew Gillen wrote:

> Mark J. Dulcey wrote:
>> DOS is another story. FDISK clears at least the first sector of any
>> partition it creates so that the partition will appear empty to the
>> FORMAT program. I don't know whether that is also true of the partition
>> tools in current versions of Windows.
>
> Wow.  I'm flabbergasted.  Who was the genius that thought that up?  I know M$
> has done some idiotic things, but that's right up there with keeping the
> hardware clock in local time instead of UTC.  Let me guess: if the first
> sector of the partition isn't zero-ed out, then FORMAT won't touch it, right?

I'm guessing its to protect uknowledgeable people from each other.

I could see someone "wiping" a dos machine by deleting the primary 
partition.  You hand the machine to the next person, and the first thing 
they would try is to add a partition.  This way they don't see the last 
person's data.