Government standards with zeroing out HDD?

[Apokalipse]

you could get a blowtorch and melt the thing.

 

[RicoDirenzo]

Too funny......and, Mr.Boogeyman, law enforcement person, the processes for data retrival are not anymore sophisitcated than what the geeks here already know. WE know that data remains, but as the drive sector become increasingly magnetized with new data, the likelyhood of perserving that data drops off considerably. If a person were to take the time to write to a hard drive 30 or 40 times, lets say, accross all the sectors, the defense department or law enforcement wouldn't find diddly squat. There is no underlying magic here. Data is magnetically stored as a flux transmission. The coating of the drive is magnetically charged and the charged portion of the media is read as a binary encoding. The charged particle = 1 and the absense = 0. If you sufficiently recharge the drive surface you will have nothing to look at. The problem lies in the fact that data is encoded in random access and nonlinear format and so to completely encode the drive the media must be written to many times. Once the entire surface of the drive has been encoded, only God then will know what was previously there. Estute criminals and terrorists know this and use this knowledge. There are limits to inquiry. Which, believe it or not, (at least for the time being) means there are limits to the invasion of our privacy which is a good thang!!!!

 

[Disillusion]

Well anyway, enough about the boogeyman and government spies. I just want to know how to zero fill the HDD.

 

[RicoDirenzo]

Hehehe. Dude, just reformat the drive...there is no point to completely re-encoding the HD!!! No one's looking and no one cares (for your sake I hope this is true) what has previously been on your drive but you!!!

 

[Disillusion]

I'm not worried about anyone looking. There's nothing to find.

I just like to start with a completely (as much as I can get) clean drive.

 

[brady]

Use Derriks Boot and Nuke... DoD acceptable.

 

[Disillusion]

Use Derriks Boot and Nuke... DoD acceptable.

That's probably what I will use. Thanks!

 

[brady]

You are welcome

 

[Beyeohazard]

Too funny......and, Mr.Boogeyman, law enforcement person, the processes for data retrival are not anymore sophisitcated than what the geeks here already know. WE know that data remains, but as the drive sector become increasingly magnetized with new data, the likelyhood of perserving that data drops off considerably. If a person were to take the time to write to a hard drive 30 or 40 times, lets say, accross all the sectors, the defense department or law enforcement wouldn't find diddly squat. There is no underlying magic here. Data is magnetically stored as a flux transmission. The coating of the drive is magnetically charged and the charged portion of the media is read as a binary encoding. The charged particle = 1 and the absense = 0. If you sufficiently recharge the drive surface you will have nothing to look at. The problem lies in the fact that data is encoded in random access and nonlinear format and so to completely encode the drive the media must be written to many times. Once the entire surface of the drive has been encoded, only God then will know what was previously there. Estute criminals and terrorists know this and use this knowledge. There are limits to inquiry. Which, believe it or not, (at least for the time being) means there are limits to the invasion of our privacy which is a good thang!!!!

Spoken like a true dissenter...lol
I was attempting to assert my love for humor, banal though it may be. I appreciate the lesson in magnetic storage dynamics though...simply enthralling.

 

[killians45]

Alot of this is not quite correct. A low level format is bad for OLD hard drives where drive information was contained on the drive platter itself. It could be recreated with the manufacturers software, but it was a pain in the butt. Now, NEWER drives (not sure of the SATA's, though I dont see why they'd be any different) contain this info on the PCB via a controller chip. So yes, you can zero it out and be fine. I've done it many times. Now, as far as techniques for getting info off the drive, Beye, you are correct. They even have micron tunneling scopes to detect slight phase change variables in the data structure. So they can in essence determine what its previous phase was and recreate said data. Usually it will be incomplete, but can even then sometimes be recreated. This is much easier to do with pictures, and very hard to do with programs and music. Now, writing zeros is especially useless if they really want to get it because there is still a slight phase transition remnants left over that can be detected. It is a zero, but with a residual charge that normal read/write head are not sensitive enough to pick up on. Thats where computer forensics come in. Now, writing data to it can also be overcome. Now, like you stated with enough read/writes using an algorythm then it will be almost impossible to do, data will be gotten but it will look like a jumbles mess. But it takes many passess by constantly changing the phase from pos to neg, much like what Rico stated. There are limitations on what they can do, but I would have to respectfully disagree that they are not that sophisticated (if thats what your saying). They are highly sophisticated, but highly expensive.