Bestbuy saying your harrdrive is dead, and than stealing your data offf of it

[Qiranworms]

The last time I formated the hard drive, I was still able to recover the files using ERD Commander, almost 90% of the files. Goes to show that you need more than that to wipe a hard drive clean.

If you need to truly wipe a disk so that it can't be recovered that way (without physically smashing the hard drive of course), there are utilities that'll just write over the entire disk several times, such as DBAN.

 

[uzi9mm]

even if they did drill a hole into the drive....
you can still recover raw data off the drive and read whatever is still viable.

Anyways last night (what a coinicidence) i spit on the geeksquad VW bug.
<embed type="application/x-mplayer2" pluginspage="http://www.microsoft.com/Windows/MediaPlayer/" name="mediaplayer1" ShowStatusBar="true" EnableContextMenu="false" autostart="false" width="320" height="240" loop="false" src="http://www.nrqproductions.net/videos/geeksquad.wmv" />

 

[Vybuni]

Lol, nice job, but why at night? Are you afraid to do it during the day when the geeks might catch you?

 

[Qiranworms]

even if they did drill a hole into the drive....
you can still recover raw data off the drive and read whatever is still viable.

But the costs required for that sort of data detection skyrocket. In other words, if all that's required to check if any data was once on a drive is plugging in and loading a recovery utility, someone may do it just for kicks. If it's thousands of dollars to hire a forensic expert with expensive and specialized equipment to obtain the raw data that may not even contain anything of interest, it's probably not going to happen.

 

[003]

Put the hard drive over a strong magnet. That'll wipe it clean!

 

[Vybuni]

Pour some gas over it and throw on a match

 

[uzi9mm]

write tons of random data on the hard drive about 4 or 5 times to get rid of ghosted data.

 

[Win2kpatcher]

Pour some gas over it and throw on a match

Actually this has been done and they were still able to recover data off it..lol..I saw this show one time on tech-tv that did various physical torture tests including burning and they still pulled data off!! even dropping it from a 2 story building..it was great.

 

[Vybuni]

They wouldn't be able to get any data off of it by the time I'm done with it.

 

[Apokalipse]

My dad brought home some industrial magnets from work one time. I very much doubt a hard drive's data wil be safe from one of them. those magnets are strong as!