Quote:
Originally Posted by 2ndgenz28
Problem is you can't wipe a HD clean, everything is still there.
After a HD crash I got several hundred gigs of data off a 40gig drive.
So don't think your yearly wipe is hiding all the porn sites you visit  |
Yes, you can "wipe" a drive.. The problem with that term is people use it incorrectly. Format is not the same thing as a wipe. A "crash" comes from "head crash" and describes a scenario when the R/W heads that levitate inside your drive casing literally crash in to the spinning platters causing physical damage.. In modern times, it's just become synonymous with other types of failures that don't include physical drive damage.
If you run a true disk wiping software, I promise you.. You're not going to be getting data back from that drive unless you put the platters under some sort of device that can determine the variances in the drive materials and can somehow read how many times the polarity on the sectors have been changed.
The reason data is recoverable on a platter is because the only thing that's being deleted is the allocation table entry.. Pretty much the same as ripping out the Table of Contents from a book.. You don't know what page a certain bit of data is on, but it's still physically typed on the page(s). A true wiper removes allocation entries as well as all physical blocks on the drive by overwriting the data with random data, patterns of 1s and 0s, etc and doing it multiple times.