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Re: [LUG] quick question: wiping a disk



Theo Zourzouvillys wrote:

I think i heard somewhere that given any disk, it's
still possible to read what was on it X number of writes before, though myabe
i just imagiend that, or it was in some really bad computer film ;)

It is alleged to be possible in some cases, I suspect hard drive
design has changed a lot since it was first postulated and there
is far less scope to pick out old bits of magnetic material that
were missed due to irregularities in the movement of the heads.

Their are potential gotcha's, like bad block reallocation moving
some data to places it can not be got at without a low level
SCSI format, but if anyone fancies their chances, I'll write
random data on top of yeah olde IDE drive I have in the in-tray,
and I'll take bets they can't recover a string that was written
all over the media with DD immediately before the random data
was written to disk.

We had a discussion along these lines before - see archive.

Simon, figuring not many of the members have access to the
relevant equipment, and even fewer have permission to use it for
personal profit ;)

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