Neverside

Can old files be seen after formatting harddrive?

Six months ago I bought a harddrive. Now it's failing, and the company will send me a new one in exchange for the old defective one. I formatted it like 5 times when installing Windows repeatedly and all - can Big Brother still see all my top-secret files and folders that I used to have before formatting it?

1984 is upon us

Moved to Tech Corner.

___________________

No, your porn habits should be safe. But just to be safe, downline Boot and Nuke to floppy and have it go over it a time or two. Before you do that though, fill the harddrive up with fake Data. Its not hard to do, and can often help to hide or at least fragment data more.

In the end though, there is about a 0% chance that the company is going to pay a tech $30+ / hour just to randomly go through someones failing harddrive...

A wee bit paranoid are we?

___________________

Bored? Join us at #Central on irc.Neverside.com

1984, the book?
I was going to read it and then got borede after 2 pages.
Is it any good, should I read it even though the start is boring, that again, if you refered to the book =p

If you used quick format then they will still be on there, it's basically like a mask.

With some good hard techniques you can properly wipe your hard drive.

If you are clever enough then maybe you can recover from a normal format but I doubt it.

cat /dev/random > /dev/adX
cat /dev/zero > /dev/adX

Repeat until your paranoia ceases.

___________________

Sykil | | UT or die

Or until `cat` disappears.

___________________

<3

Depends if you format it using a magnet or not!

Samurai_Zero's procedure above is what I would have suggested.

___________________

http://dmtfn.com - stay tuned kiddies.

Sam Mellick - Gaming 'til his eyes bleed since 1991.

Originally posted by pingu:

Depends if you format it using a magnet or not!

Samurai_Zero's procedure above is what I would have suggested.

Yep, a nice little magnet should work quite well.

But then they might notice it's been physically sabotaged, and they might void the warranty :P