Zeroed out my drive -- why are 2 files still there?

I set my computer to zero out my drive over 7 passes last night. I just checked it and it appears that it worked -- it states that only 73.3 MB of the drive are currently being used by 2 files. What are these 2 files and how can they be there if everything on the drive has been erased?
G5 Mac OS X (10.4.6)

Launch Terminal (in Applications/Utilities). type the following command (replacing "yourdrivename" with your drive's name - if you have spaces, you will have to escape them with a backslash "\" like: your\ drive\ name ):
ls -al /Volumes/yourdrivename
You will see that there are two files (. and ..) that are required by Unix for every directory (folder). "." is the current folder, ".." is the next-higher-up folder in the tree.
Required by Unix.
Russ

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Is it sufficient just to reformat to Mac formats? I thought zeroing out was just necessary if you wanted to erase previously held data (to prevent recovery)?
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Tom may have his own reason. Here is mine -
Zeroing out a new drive is plain old 'good practice.' It exercises the entire drive mechanism over an extended period of time by writing zeros to every location on every platter in the unit. This way your disk directory as well as all data locations are assured of being 'empty'. Doing this, especially to a new drive, will add to your confidence that your new drive is working properly.
If you just erase the disk, only the directory is emptied. This is like removing the table of contents page from a book, but the rest of the book is still there !
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Michael710 wrote:
I have been using my 27" iMac for various software testing. Now that my testing is complete I want to wipe the drive and start fresh. In Disk Utility there are many options to choose from when going to Erase > Security Options. Is there any benefit to Zeroing out the drive before re-installing Snow Leopard?
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Message was edited by: V.K.

When the Apple Store tests a zeroed out hard drive, is their test as intensive as wd lifesaver etc. software's in napping out bad sectors etc.

When the Apple Store tests a zeroed out hard drive, is their test as intensive as wd lifesaver etc. software's in napping out bad sectors etc.
I do know one test at the Apple store is a three or four hour test that is very thorough for the whole Mac Pro computer, system by system test, I'm curious what kind of test they perform if you're testing the hard drive for bad sectors or whatever I'm a novice
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The chip on the hard drive itself basically takes care of bad sectors. If an operation tries to write to such a sector, the drive will mark it bad and move onto the next one. That's why zeroing the drive effectively does the operation of mapping bad sectors - the whole drive is checked.
Their general hardware test does not do a full drive check, as far as I remember - the memory check can take a long time, though, since they're looking for random errors.
So for your Mac Pro, you should feel confident that doing a one-pass zero (don't do more than one pass, it's a waste of it me), will be enough initialization for the drive. And many drive experts don't even bother with that, relying on modern drive chips/firmware to do the job of checking for bad sectors on the fly.
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Zeroed out my drive -- why are 2 files still there?

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