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southern MN | It is very expensive & hit & miss to recover a properly erased hard drive.
Lets compare a hard drive to a magazine.
In the typical quick reformat, the pages are not made blank. Instead, the computer erases the table of contents.
As the hard drive is reused, then new info is written on the pages. Until then, the old info is still sitting on the pages. It takes a little bit of knowledge to see that old info, but not much.
If you get one of the wiper programs that really goes in and writes zeros to all the pages of the magazines, then it truely is reformatted and the old data is gone. This can take a long time, but is what you need to do.
If you have deep govt secrets or the receipe to KFC chicken on your hard drive, there are ways to recover phanotom leftover data even after a drive is zeroed out. But that is terribly intensive & expensive and often only gets 1/2 of the data recoverable - no one will bother with this to get your bank info when there are so many other fresh hard drives to pick through out there....
Basicly you want to find a freeware program that will actually erase your whole hard drive, not just the index. It does so by writing zeros on each piece of the hard drive so all the old data is overwritten.
That's good enough for 99% of us.
--->Paul | |
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Wiping a hard drive
