wrote:
On Thu, 22 Apr 2010 07:40:21 -0400, wrote:

On Wed, 21 Apr 2010 21:05:40 -0400, wrote:

On Tue, 20 Apr 2010 19:50:45 -0700 (PDT), Evan
wrote:

On Apr 20, 7:48 pm, "Stormin Mormon"
wrote:
Some windows programs allow for a drive reformat, which
allows you to pass the drives along to charity, or ohter
users.

--
Christopher A. Young
Learn more about Jesus
www.lds.org

I hate to burst your bubble but if it is something that windows can do
and someone
has not yet tried to reuse the drive there are a multitude of programs
out there that
can *easily* undo it...

~~ Evan
Not t rue. There are many ways under WinDoze to scrub a drive to
military/Government security specs. - which means there is NOTHING
recoverable on the drive - period.
Not true.

It is far from trivial to completely wipe a disk to make it
unrecoverable without physically destroying the hardware as the final
step.


We are not talking about NSA that can do atomic analysis of the
platters we are talking about some hacker with a PC reading the
sectors directly off the drive. If you overwrite them you foil anyone
who is not taking the drive apart and looking at the oxide.
The problem is most operating systems do not really erase anything
they just change the directory entry and that is easy to reconstruct.
If you write over the whole surface, for all but the most capable
forensic operations, that data is gone.

here is the 'quick scrub' utility I could not remember the name of in my
previous post:

http://cmrr.ucsd.edu/people/Hughes/SecureErase.shtml

Your tax dollars helped pay to develop it, you may as well try it. Boot
from a floppy and call it up, and it does a hardware call directly to
the electronics on the drive, and tells it to lobotomize itself.

--
aem sends...