Re: Linux FS Question
On Wed, 18 Jun 1997, Rick Macdonald wrote:
> > Actually it's not superstition at all. I think you can still recover a file
> > that's been overwritten once with zeroes... just open the HD (in a clean
> > room, of course) and read off the sectors with a electron microscope (or
>
> I think the older Norton manuals explained the "government wipe" in
> greater detail. The one I have now doesn't say how many repeats, only that
> a fast wipe of one pass of zeros takes a few seconds on a 1.44MB floppy,
> whereas a government wipe takes about two hours. It says the "last
> character" used has to be decimal 246. I wonder if there are government
> employees who make a living scraping ones and zeros off erased disks...
There's a hardware aspect to the problem of erasing floppies by writing
over them. Whereas a HD is written by the same head every time, floppies
are typicaly written by several different ones, which may vary in their
exact geometry. You might write over it many times, but someone just reads
the data from the guard bands.
Surely the residual value of a used floppy is less than two hours usage of
any piece of hardware. Perhaps two seconds in a mincing machine.
--
David Wright, Open University, Earth Science Department, Milton Keynes MK7 6AA
U.K. email: d.wright@open.ac.uk tel: +44 1908 653 739 fax: +44 1908 655 151
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