One filling a drive?

[DrFreeman]

I apologize if this question has already been asked, I've searched with every possible keyword I could think of and found nothing. Is there any way to "one fill" a drive, precisely, is there a way to fill each sector with the opposite of what gets written during a standard zero fill? After zero filling, using the disk contents inspector reads the sector data as all zeroes, what do I have to do to magnetically flip all sectors the other way? Maybe I'm missing something relating to how the data is encoded on the drive? I'm pretty sure there is a way to do it with the configurable pattern option, I just don't know how. Simply entering a values into the configurable byte sequence doesn't seem to work. Entering zeroes and then inspecting the contents it says 30 30 30 and not zeroes like with a zero fill. Can you please tell me what I've missed?

[hdsentinel]

Please check the Help:

https://www.hdsentinel.com/help/en/61_surfacetest.html

Note: on the Configuration page, it is possible to configure the pattern to be written by the write test. By default, Hard Disk Sentinel writes zeroes (00 bytes) but it is possible to specify that all sectors should contain the sector numbers (may be useful in later data recovery) or even random data. Also it is possible to specify any byte/byte sequence as overwrite pattern. For example entering ABC in the byte/byte sequence field will cause that all sectors will contain ABC string repeating. In this option, it is possible to enter hex sequence, for example 0x99 0x88 0x77 to write such bytes. It is also possible to specify FILE=existing file name, then the contents of the file will be used as overwrite pattern.

This is why if you enter 0 - then the 0 character itself is written (with ASCII code 0x30, this is why you see 30 30 30 in the sector).

You would need to specify 0xFF in the Pattern field.
Then all sectors will be filled with FF FF FF ... (all bits set to one).

[DrFreeman]

Thank you very much!