On Sunday 18 July 2004 4:25 pm, Jon Dowland wrote: > On Sun, 18 Jul 2004 16:10:39 -0600, Doug Holland <meldroc@frii.com> wrote: > > On Sunday 18 July 2004 11:52 am, Frank Gevaerts wrote: > > > On Sun, Jul 18, 2004 at 01:02:17PM -0400, H. S. wrote: > > > > I am in a situation where a computer is to be given away and prior to > > > > that it's hard disk needs to *thoroughly* cleaned (data consists of > > > > financial information, reports, class exams, competition exams, etc). > > > > > > Try http://dban.sourceforge.net/ > > > > I second this suggestion. DBAN (short for Darik's Boot n' Nuke will wipe > > your hard disk to the point where only the NSA has any hope of recovering > > data. > > I read an interesting article about data recovery and the approaches > that can be used. Specialist places have ultra-fine read heads that > can catch ghost images towards the edge of tracks; which your head may > have missed. I think this is only the tip of the iceberg. > > Without scaremongering, if the information you want to remove is of > such a critical nature that it must never be recovered no matter what > cost; you would have to destroy the drive. In the end, it depends on your answer to the question "Do I have any enemies willing to spend tens-to-hundreds of thousands of dollars on the off-chance that there is something useful on this drive?" For most of us, the answer is no. There are methods such as magnetic force microscopy that might be able to recover data that was wiped with a tool such as DBAN. They are very expensive, require lots of expensive equipment, operated by expensive, very smart people, are very slow and labor intensive, and have no real guarantee of recovering anything useful. If the answer is yes (usually we're talking about government contractors with classified data), then the only answer is to physically destroy the hard disk's platters.
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