Thanks Rob...I think it's not as easy as some might think.....I talked to a guy today who told me that he could accomplish what I'm talking about with the aid of a very large magnet......I don't know whether to buy that, or not....although, it might be possible.......back when I did tech support - I took a call one day from a pilot....he told me that while he was on a flight that a storm had come through the area where he lived....he lived in a TownHouse.....he told me that lightening had struck the satellite dish located at the corner of his TownHouse.....he told me that the brick on that corner of the building had become as brittle as glass.....he said the bricks would crumble with very little effort.....he told me that every electricial appliance including media and computer equipment was fried....AND, that every CD, and audio/video cassette in the place was erased........all I had to go on was what he told me, and since I was unable to actually see what he was telling me - then I was left with a little doubt as to the validity of his claim......BUT, I also know that anything is possible when it comes to nature and the results of nature......you think that's possible?
Rob Stow said:
IF I wanted to wipe my hard drive clean in a way that would make it
impossible for any of the data to ever be recovered again - how would I
go about it? In other words, I want to reset a hard drive back to the
way it was before anything was loaded onto it. All zero's is what I
want - Are their utility programs that will wipe a hdd down to
zilch......running a debug script, then fdisk, and format won't
eliminate all trace evidence of prior data will it? I suppose I
should let you know that this is not something I'm wanting to do - it is
a topic of discussion I'm involved in.....some people are claiming that
a simple format c: /u will accomplish what I'm talking about, and I
disagree with them.....any one know for sure?
Very little data is written to a drive when it is formatted,
hence merely formatting a drive does not touch most of the data
that was on the drive and it can be easily recovered by a wide
variety of programs.
There are many apps out there that will truly delete everything
on a drive. A commonly used standard is to overwrite the whole
drive seven times - zero every bit, then fill every bit with
ones, then zero it again, and so on.
Overwriting every bit once with either zeroes, ones, or random
gibberish is good enough to protect old data from data recovery
tools that are strictly software based. Hardware based data
recovery like the FBI uses can read residual magnetic fields left
behind when a bit on the drive has been overwritten so it takes a
more intensive wiping effort to prevent that.
You should do a search for the US Dept of Defence standard
DOD 5220.22-M.