Re: destorying the hard drive
I certainly would expect that writing pseudorandom, or even identical, bytes
to each and every sector on the disk would make it nigh impossible to
recover anything, - IF that laboriously slow procedure was invoked. How it
could possibly be otherwise makes little sense to me - unless we operate
under the assumption that the electromagnetic writes are somewhat incomplete
(that is, the magnetic domains on the disk are not fully reversed (or
realigned) completely, but still have some very small residual leftover
effects (i.e. retentivity) from a previous write operation). (I'm an EE,
but I'm just making some basic assumptions here!).
> John John wrote:
>> Mike Y wrote:
>>
>>>> you will not be able to recover any data whatsoever on a wiped hard
>>>> drive, it can't be done, period!
>>>>
>>>> John
>>>>
>>>> And by the way, I do not work for any company that is in anyway
>>>> involved
>>>> in the sale or development of anything to do with computer technology
>>>> or
>>>> software.
>>>
>>>
>>> Well, I do, and did. I've been involved with the 380 chip set way back,
>>> and
>>> I do know a bit about how it and hard drives in general work. And while
>>> I've
>>> not personally done it, I AM aware of the technologies involved, the
>>> theory
>>> behind the technologies, and the practice implementing those
>>> technologies.
>>> Granted, I've not heard much about the techniques since drives moved
>>> into
>>> the ZBR (a LOT changed when drives went that route) world with the high
>>> speed transfers (compared to early MFM), but there's nothing in the
>>> techniques or theory that would make it impossible other than that the
>>> tools and techniques have to stay 'ahead of the game' the same way they
>>> were then.
>>>
>>> It's doable. Period!
>>
>> It cannot be done! Period! It is a theory only and it has never been
>> proven! Not too long ago the US Department of Defense issued a tender
>> call for someone to provide methods to recover data from wiped drives
>> and no one stepped up to the plate to fill the tender request.
>
> <snip>