What Scott said and what Theresa said, with this caveat. From what I was told when a hard drive with research data on it was accidentally wiped and overwritten with ones and zeros several times: $10,000 for a company to open the drive remove the plates and maybe, just maybe, with an electron scanner recover the info... No guarantee, no refunds, and they wanted the money up front. Back in the early 90s though.
On Sat, Oct 3, 2009 at 3:28 PM, Theresa Kehoe <[email protected]> wrote: > > On Sat, 2009-10-03 at 10:13 -0400, Robert Citek wrote: > > Anyone have any ideas on how to recover data form a wiped drive? > > Spend $500 or more. > > "Even after overwriting data, it is possible for someone to take the HDD > or other storage device to a specialized data recovery laboratory and > use highly sensitive (and expensive) equipment to search for the faint > traces of the original data, which can be relatively easy to detect if > it has been overwritten only one or a few times." [1] > > Theresa > > > I inadvertently shredded the wrong drive. Instead of using /dev/sdb, > > which refers to my external USB drive, I used /dev/sda, which is my > > internal drive. Here are what the last few lines from the shred look > > like as well as the output from an od: > > > > # shred -v -n 0 -z /dev/sda > > ... > > shred: /dev/sda: pass 1/1 (000000)...73GiB/75GiB 97% > > shred: /dev/sda: pass 1/1 (000000)...74GiB/75GiB 99% > > shred: /dev/sda: pass 1/1 (000000)...75GiB/75GiB 100% > > # od -bc /dev/sda > > 0000000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 > > \0 \0 \0 \0 \0 \0 \0 \0 \0 \0 \0 \0 \0 \0 \0 \0 > > * > > 1124174260000 > > # > > > > Nothing but a bunch of zeros. Notice this isn't just a partition. > > It's the entire drive. So, the partition table, all the partitions, > > all the extended partitions, swap space, and all filesystems are no > > longer visible. > > > > Is this data pretty much gone, or is there some "low-level" stuff that > > I can do to get back the data, even just a few files? > > > > Regards, > > - Robert > > > > > > [1] http://www.linfo.org/shred.html > > > > > --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ Central West End Linux Users Group (via Google Groups) Main page: http://www.cwelug.org To post: [email protected] To subscribe: [email protected] To unsubscribe: [email protected] More options: http://groups.google.com/group/cwelug -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
