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Post by perv on Aug 29, 2009 1:49:14 GMT -5
Almost makes me want to buy a bunch of used drives off eBay or something just to see what I get.
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Post by Napoleon the Clown on Aug 29, 2009 5:43:54 GMT -5
V&? You never know what the fucker had on there before they sold it to you, and you may still get in trouble for possessing it, even if you didn't know it was there.
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Post by SaveTheBales on Aug 29, 2009 15:26:46 GMT -5
Storage is pretty cheap, particularly internal hard drives. The best way to be sure old data's gone for good is to drill the drive full of holes. Better yet, take the "target practice" route with a blaster of choice. I like this one:
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Post by malendras on Aug 29, 2009 20:02:45 GMT -5
Or just make some thermite and set that off on the drive. Whatever's left will be indistinguishable from the rest of the molten metal. It's easy to make and you can find the recipe online.
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Post by perv on Aug 29, 2009 22:58:07 GMT -5
Storage is pretty cheap, particularly internal hard drives. The best way to be sure old data's gone for good is to drill the drive full of holes. That's not necessarily true. It may actually give inferior results to a simple overwrite. Imagine a phonograph record. Which would be a better way to destroy the content, breaking it in pieces or taking something like a nail and scraping it along the whole length of the groove? The nail is like an overwrite. Conceivably if you didn't dig the nail in hard enough someone could recover the data. But if you just smash the disc you leave whole chunks of completely undamaged data. Of course, you could do both. Thermite should do the job nicely, or a powerful acid. But there's a drawback to using overkill methods like these. Some of them (e.g. thermite, guns) tend to attract attention and make people wonder just what you had on that drive that needed to be destroyed so completely.
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Post by lumberjackninja on Aug 30, 2009 2:12:48 GMT -5
I do believe that exposure of the platters to a high-frequency oscillating magnetic field would cause them to liquefy and then start on fire, due to the ferrous nature of the storage medium.
In other words, open it up and drop it in your microwave. Hilarity and x-rays ensue.
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Post by Napoleon the Clown on Aug 30, 2009 3:02:16 GMT -5
Seriously, if we're going the overkill route, the safe and easy method is a strong electromagnet. Wave it over the drive a few times and recovering anything off it is going to be essentially impossible.
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Post by Bluefinger on Aug 30, 2009 5:59:36 GMT -5
Or just make some thermite and set that off on the drive. Whatever's left will be indistinguishable from the rest of the molten metal. It's easy to make and you can find the recipe online. Thermite's just Fe 2O 3 Iron Oxide mixed with Aluminium powder. You need something to set it off though, but once it gets going, it's just a plain old simple reduction reaction. Mind you, a very exothermic reduction reaction, but nonetheless, basic chemistry here. The reason the drive won't survive that is because the reaction produces molten iron. That would melt right through the plastic and the ceramic plates that form the drive platters. So there you have it... some rust and aluminium powder.
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Post by the sandman on Aug 30, 2009 10:48:40 GMT -5
If you REALLY want to make sure those files are permanantly gone, my preferred method is a claw hammer, a pair of tinsnips, and a small jar of hydrochloric acid.
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Post by RavynousHunter on Aug 30, 2009 13:43:11 GMT -5
You could always use a good old-fashioned sledgehammer.
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Post by Radiation on Aug 30, 2009 18:34:56 GMT -5
So how exactly do you recover data on used computers/hard drives? I'm just curious.
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Post by RavynousHunter on Aug 31, 2009 4:18:07 GMT -5
Something along the lines of Recuva can do it for you. Basically, when you delete a file, the file isn't actually gone, its just deallocated, meaning the space is freed up so that other files can write their data there. If you get to the file in time, you can recover it, ie: copy the actual data from the drive though the file isn't "there." For more info, see Wikipedia.
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Post by The Lazy One on Aug 31, 2009 9:12:35 GMT -5
Data recovery software. It's not that expensive, and it works pretty well. When my mom crashed her computer, my dad went to the computer store and spent $20 to get data recovery software. It brought back 99% of my mom's data.
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Post by Tiger on Aug 31, 2009 21:08:55 GMT -5
Reformat the drive, then fill the drive up with random binary, lather rinse repeat 3-7 times. DoD certified way to make files unrecoverable. Why is the repetition necessary? If the drive is full of random binary, there's nothing there but random binary. Any files that used to be there are gone and unrecoverable.
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Post by perv on Sept 1, 2009 1:52:00 GMT -5
Reformat the drive, then fill the drive up with random binary, lather rinse repeat 3-7 times. DoD certified way to make files unrecoverable. Why is the repetition necessary? If the drive is full of random binary, there's nothing there but random binary. Any files that used to be there are gone and unrecoverable. Rumor has it that it might be possible to recover single-overwritten data because either the bits aren't quite 100% magnetized each pass, leaving some trace of what was there before, or because the tracking could be off just enough to leave some of the old data on the edge. In either case, it has never been demonstrated as usable in practice. It's not too far fetched to think just maybe the g-men can do that kind of thing, but there's no way it gets used routinely. I'm sure it would be extremely time consuming and expensive.
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