Excessive SHOCK!

[luni]

Lol, great work on that HDD, not many would go that far to try and please a customer.

[Technoid]

It was a challenge

[Kurt]

actually it is possible to recover data even when it's been erased various times. in short, you see the "ghost" of the data -that doesn't mean you won't end up with a lot of useless garbage but you might be able to see sth... who knows a "0" at a *certain* point of the drive *might* have a meaning for *someone*...

btw, the greenies are called aliens around here

[Kooldino]

Holy thread reserrection, batman.

[Technoid]

Originally posted by Kurt
actually it is possible to recover data even when it's been erased various times. in short, you see the "ghost" of the data -that doesn't mean you won't end up with a lot of useless garbage but you might be able to see sth... who knows a "0" at a *certain* point of the drive *might* have a meaning for *someone*...

btw, the greenies are called aliens around here

uhm, yeah, right, still that is a looong way from that to the paranoid delusions that the military suffers from

[Chrono_Wanderer]

haha speaking of HDDs...

At my school we have a Western Digital opened up, because my teacher thought it was dead.

We have a TA in my class, and he put his finger print onto the platter

This is what gets interesting...

This dude in my class connected the HDD to the computer. Turned it on, it works flawlessly

We did a scandisk with sufrace test. Guess what, no bad sector found

So here we are completely SHOCKED

And my teacher is planning to make a sort of display out of this drive for future student Along with other showcases like CPUs from 8086 to today's CPU (oh ya, the and we actually have lots of Pentium silicon dies lying around along with this whole sheet of pentiums so that's pretty intersting)

[Technoid]

amazing

[GT98]

hmm I have to check the directions I got in work for destroying data on hard drives that where used for classified data. I think the US army standard is just write zeros to the drive.

When we had to turn in some old Amigas I took the old HDD out and then took a slegehammer to them

[DGhost]

GT98 - it depends on the sensitivity of the data. i believe the government wide hard drive wipe involves writing garbage over the whole drive multiple times.

and, last I checked the FBI could even still read data that has been overwriten multiple times without too much problem. its just that the process is slightly delicate and expensive to do. if there is a will there is a way.

the only way to ensure that the data cannot be recovered is to destroy the physical medium it was stored on.

[Forge]

I don't recall where I heard this, but I do recall it being a reliable source. Take this as you will:

While single pass zeros is enough for very low sensitivity items, and multipass zeroes/multipass garbage will take care of low classification data, it gets progressively more elaborate, the more sensitive the data handled.

The Pentagon requires daily movement of all data. They basically have something similar to a defragger... Except instead of simply reorganizing the data, it also puts it in a new location each day. This came to me by way of a clerk who was fired (along with a few IT guys) for having a defragger on his work PC. This rearranger utility is used to keep the disk from picking up 'resonances', and a defragger that intelligently places data would do the exact opposite.

The second half/the 'why': Apparently the government (and presumably other governments/groups) have these really precise magnetic scanners... They could take a HDD, wipe the platters (as part of the *recovery process!*), and then run this magnetic scanner thing across them. Apparently, if you set data down on a platter, and you don't move it for a noteworthy amount of time, the disk acquires a tiny tendency towards that data... If one bit on the platter has been a zero for 4 years, when you blank the disk and run this scanner over it, it can see that it's been a zero for a large amount of time, recently. Same for ones.

That's why many of the high grade security levels require destruction of any media, removable or fixed, when a computer is losing it's security status.

[Kurt]

Yep. That's your "ghost" data right there....

[DentyCracker]

run dban and it completely fuXx0r5 any data on the disk