On Mon, 6 Dec 2004 16:10:21 -0700, Brad Bourn
If I had already deleted the data I wanted to make sure was gone, I would want to set all un-used parts of the drive to 0's. (where the data used to live) because deleting doesn't actually get rid of the data, just the pointer to that data. Then by writing 0's to the unused parts of the drive, your are effectively overwriting what used to be there with non-sense. As another poster pointed out, there seems to be a threshhold that the data is considered un-recoverable, mentioning that for the company he worked for previously, was 9X. The standard for DoD (Deriks Boott & Nuke) I read was 7X.
Anyway, I'll be happy with the 2 I have already gotten and seems like the drive is on it's last leg with the 3rd.
You're fine. My company does data recovery and computer forensics. I am not aware of any commercial data recovery company that can read "fringe effects". Obviously it is possible, but only the DOD or NSA, etc. have the neccesary equipment. OTOH, we have recovered data from "wiped" drives. The reason is simply that programs have bugs, or I even think some wiping programs don't do anything but look pretty and get the customer to pay for them. Therefore, when we need to clean and re-use a drive, we simply use 'dd if=/dev/null of=/dev/hdc". Greg