On Friday, March 7, 2008 at 08:22:41 (-0800) Michael Perelman writes:
>Bill, I don't understand.  I though that the system magnetically
>writes a 0 or a 1 on each location & that programs are available that
>overwrite everything with 0's.  Are you saying that the spot on the
>drive can be a 0 with a residue of a 1?

Yes.  Drives can retain a series of magnetic ghost images.  The issue
is then to understand how many of these will hang around, and how many
times to overwrite each byte in the disk.  I'd say if you rewrote each
byte on the disk a dozen times (where "rewrote" means writing to the
disk and "syncing" it to ensure the value you are writing actually
moves from memory to the hard drive platter) with sufficiently
scrambled data, you'd be hard-pressed to recover anything from the
disk.

I should mention that I am no expert in this area, and this is merely
my rather casual understanding of the issue.


Bill
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