Disk Wipe Methods

Dustin Decker dustind at moon-lite.com
Tue Jan 21 18:39:15 CST 2003


On Tue, 21 Jan 2003, Brian Densmore wrote:

> Hi Kevin,
> 
> I wasn't ridiculing you. I just would have to see this method of
> extraction to believe this person wasn't bsing you. I won't dispute that
> there is a "great deal of space" between tracks. Space that would be
> altered by magnetizing the disk. But that also means every time you
> magnetize it with a different value it changes. To be able to backtrack
> what sequence of events created the interspace pattern would take
> incredible equations. I doubt it is feasible. 

Oh it's quite feasible I assure you.  I have make extensive use of 
Recovery 2000 Pro in the past... and have had very little trouble going 
back YEARS into data that was on the drive about 15 partitions ago.  We're 
talking about $75.00 here, software only, no special hardware at all.  
(And this is Windows software - so there prolly isn't a whole lot of magic 
going on there.)

The ultimate answer here is that overwriting the drive does not always 
overwrite precisely the same portions of the drive - thus the data is 
interleaved between old data in a lot of cases.

What we have determined to be our best solution in house for the problem
that started this thread is that we'll be making use of encryption.  
We'll be killing the encrypted files, and overwriting _those_ with
encrypted garbage of all things. 
D.

-- 
*-----------------------------------*
| Dustin Decker                     |
| dustind at moon-lite.com       *-----------------------------------------*
| http://www.dustindecker.com |                                         |
| Moon-Lite Computing         |                                         |
| 913.579.7117                |  A baby is God's opinion that the world |
                              |  should go on.                          |
*-----------------------------|		-- Carl Sandburg                |
                              |                                         |
                              *-----------------------------------------*




More information about the Kclug mailing list