Thread: truely Cleaning a hard disk

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    Registered User xds4lx's Avatar
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    truely Cleaning a hard disk

    Ive been thinking lately on ways to totally clean a hard disk to hide files or information. I know that you can download programs to do this that just dump meaningless information into the drive to cover up what was previously there. But does this really work good and provide an efficient method of covering up things? not that i have anything to hide but i bought a laptop from my dads company for $75 bucks, a pII 533 128mb pc133 22gb hd prettey decent, and they didnt even format the hd! I told my dad about that and they are looking into ways of taking care of this, i told him that formating doenst really work so is this a viable soloution?

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    cereal killer dP munky's Avatar
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    guns dont kill people, abortion clinics kill people.

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    Registered User foniks munkee's Avatar
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    Take the lid off - run it through a bulk eraser and fill the drive with epoxy resin. You would be surprised as to what they can get off a "formated disk".

    I know that it is possible to retrieve data from a disk which has been formated (even low level formatted) a number of times.
    "Queen and huntress, chaste and fair,
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    format 7 times. thats what the gov. says will clean it.
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    Redundantly Redundant RoD's Avatar
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    Originally posted by no-one
    format 7 times. thats what the gov. says will clean it.
    ya lets listen to the goverment

    </sarcasm>

  6. #6
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    well then they did only format once the HDD's they sold to china from Los Alamos, that the chinese got an ass load of info from.

    so its a pretty good assumption that more than that makes it hard for you to accidentally give information to the enemy. Oh wait they're allies now right(sarcasm).

    ::edited for posterity::

    secondly, you'll all remember the Weekly World News report that hackers can make your computer physically explode and kill you remotely, so i'm sure nothings safe
    Last edited by no-one; 01-19-2003 at 03:55 PM.
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    Just a Member ammar's Avatar
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    Originally posted by foniks munkee
    Take the lid off - run it through a bulk eraser and fill the drive with epoxy resin. You would be surprised as to what they can get off a "formated disk".

    I know that it is possible to retrieve data from a disk which has been formated (even low level formatted) a number of times.
    Can you please explain more, I've never heard of this.
    none...

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    just delete all the files, then fill up the HD with zeros a few times. Once the data has been written over, its gone for good
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    Registered User foniks munkee's Avatar
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    Can you please explain more, I've never heard of this.
    I am not sure of the techniques used exactly - but a (sort of) friend who works for the Australian federal police in a computer forensics lab described their ability to retrieve data from supposedly wiped disks. The way he described it was that a magnetic storage medium will contain residual traces of the data - even when overwritten, their job is to write programs and design hardware to retrieve this data and apparently it works.

    I have also seen a rather amazing case where a guy in the US was convicted of murder and one of the key peices of evidence used was a floppy disk that contained a letter to a man who was hired to kill his wife. They were able to reconstruct the data from a floppy that was formatted then cut up into tiny peices with serrated scissors.
    "Queen and huntress, chaste and fair,
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    As a general rule, the data cannot be completely erased. No matter how many times you format, fdisk, etc, the data is still there until it is written over. Which is how the fbi, data recovery centers, and so forth can get data from formatted and damaged hard drives. There are some ways around this though, typically 3rd party software, i'm not sure about nowadays, but cleansweep used to do the job quite nicely, it would wipe the stuff clean off the drive, but then again who knows if it was legit, other than the fbi and such there's not much of a way to test this product, and if it did that they probably would not let it on the market, (typically speaking of the govt. in the states only, i'm not sure how that kind of stuff is overseas)

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    Code Monkey Davros's Avatar
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    Some of you may find this interesting:

    http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/2676461.stm
    OS: Windows XP
    Compilers: MinGW (Code::Blocks), BCB 5

    BigAngryDog.com

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    Mayor of Awesometown Govtcheez's Avatar
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    >then fill up the HD with zeros a few times.

    That won't do it - if you just copy 0s over it every time, everything's just at a lower voltage than before - it's still recoverable.

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    >That won't do it - if you just copy 0s over it every time, everything's just at a lower voltage than before - it's still recoverable.

    Somehow i doubt that.... but okay, fill it up with random data!
    C Code. C Code Run. Run Code Run... Please!

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  14. #14
    Mayor of Awesometown Govtcheez's Avatar
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    OK, to simplify things, let's say a HD thinks a bit's at 1 if the voltage is between 5-10 and 0 if the voltage is 0-5. if you write zeroes over it, it won't take it all the way down to zero, just closer to it. Some of the data will still be recoverable... (there was a story on /. yesterday about this exact same thing (and the suggestion foniks munkee posted was exactly the same as one of the suggestions there) - check on it for more info)

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