So with a bad sector, you might be able to recover a couple of bytes of the old data. Maybe.
Bear in mind that the most likely reason for the drive to map out a sector is because it can no longer find the address marks to tell where the sector starts. If that's the case then no amount of vendor-specific commands will fix that...
You've not actually read further up this thread, have you?
Drives don't write 1s and 0s, and they haven't done since before Jurassic Park was released.
1. having search boxes on menus and windows is just a crutch. the whole point is to see what you're looking for in a graphically intuitive way. Adding search boxes is just admitting the design sucks.
No, it isn't. How do you meaningfully represent the thousands of different things? As it is, the Gnome and Unity app menus with masses of identical little boxes is confusing enough.
You don't walk into a shop and point at stuff behind the counter and say "that" "that" "that" to get it, you ask the person for what you want.
By the same token, sit a newbie down in front of Windows and how will they guess where things are?
It took me about 20 minutes to work out how to get into the network settings, and I'm reasonably familiar with computers (but still quite new to using Windows).
You can confiscate them, though, because they're probably being operated without the appropriate RF licence.
I can't wait for someone to try that out over here.
The other issue is the KGB threat model. DriveSavers isn't going to drag out electron microscopes and other ridiculously high-tech stuff to catch the magnetic images of that 1 bit that weren't quite wiped out by writing a 0 bit over it.
As I mentioned in an earlier post, that's an overly-simplistic way of looking at hard disks, and one that hasn't worked since before the vast majority of
You cannot magically read off "magnetic signatures" and reconstruct data from a drive, after the data has been overwritten. If you believe that you can, then presumably you believe in homeopathic medicine too, since it's the same principle.
Wrong. A single pass of zero is often recoverable. Not for civilians, sure, but recoverable nonetheless.
Bullshit. Once the data has been overwritten, it is *gone*, forever. There is no way to get it back. There is no "residual magnetism", and if there is it would be impossible to reconstruct it into a valid data stream.
It might be just-about-possible on 1970s MFM hard disks.
I would suspect that anyone with a sufficiently good enough data recovery system can probably read the bits that have been zeroed. Since you're changing everything to the same state, it doesn't seem at all unlikely that reading small fluctuations in those "zero's" would be possible.
But you still need some way of knowing what the difference between a valid zero and the residual print-through is - and that difference is *tiny*.
Furthermore, drives haven't written 1s and 0s since the very earliest days of IDE, over 20 years ago. Now they use something similar to QAM so rather than trying to pick out the traces of 1010101010 from underneath 0000000000, you're trying to pick out 1758923065 from underneath 8959205253 - if you see what I mean.
I can say this though, if I worked in a data center, and had the job of wiping old drives being taken out of commission, I would definitely ask my company to buy one of those systems to save me the time and aggravation of doing it some other way.
You've got the asset number and the MAC addresses, right? PXE boot and DBAN...
'Not to mention the fact that destroying non-defective drives is FUCKING WASTEFUL'.
A million times, this. You don't need a 2TB drive in your desktop that uses network shares for saving everything.
Exactly. A single pass of
I *did* wonder what sort of Civic required a 90Ah battery. The one in my Citroen is a big heavy 110Ah battery the same size as the one in the diesel model - both engines are big heavy old tractor-y things
I'm Scottish, I'm about 40, I've never heard it in common usage. My mum says it used to be common before the war.
From a bit of investigating, it looks like 60 "lb" is really 27kg, which isn't very heavy - about normal for a smallish car battery, the sort of thing you could pick up like a lunchbox and carry about.
60lb (~5 stone to put it in units you can understand)
A whatnow? Presumably that depends on the size of stone, and what sort of rock it's made of?
I'm pretty sure you could do some suspend magic to make it draw less power, and I can't really think of any reason why you'd need to have it sitting idle-but-powered with the engine off for more than a couple of hours.
A 90Ah battery is fairly small and inexpensive, and certainly smaller than the existing battery in my car. It's certainly not heavy, compared to the rest of the stuff I carry about - I'm not sure what an "lb" is but the 110Ah battery for the car is about 30kg.
Deep cycle battery and a split-charging relay. If I'm leaving the vehicle parked up for more than a day or so, I'll just power all the computery stuff off.
He has not acquired a fortune; the fortune has acquired him. -- Bion
