Donald Musser wrote:
They only way to make 100% sure the data is unrecoverable is to physically melt the aluminum platters, either in a furnace, or perhaps with an oxy-acetylene torch.
The reason for this is that regardless of how to rewrite BS data to the drive, old copies of the data can be recovered using a scanning tunneling microscope from the magnetic molecules at the periphery of each bit.
To eliminate this, you have to completely destroy the order of the disk, and that requires changing the physical state of the metal in the disk platters.
Yeah, he's pretty much got it there. Of course, there are ways to try and hide the information well enough (I've seen government-provisioned programs that overwrite disks bit-by-bit 4 or 5 times), but all the info will still be there...like a ghost, forever haunting the disks...
Hah, so you can go GhostBuster-postal on the disks if you don't feel the need to make money off of them.
"Ghostbuster" is a pretty good description of that theoretical possibility. If you want to try to actually piece together information that way, you would probably have a better yield to filter the Themse for gold. After some hundred years you might have some gram of gold! Though, If you are the least bit in doubt about security for whatever reasons, just destroy the data discs of the hdds physically as thorough as possible. Sandy -- List replies only please! Please address PMs to: news-reply2 (@) japantest (.) homelinux (.) com