On Wed, 17 Feb 1999 03:01:29 -0500 "John P. Tomany" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
wrote:
>>That's why the limited amount of classified data permitted on some
>>military PCs must be "wiped", in addition to deleted; these programs
>>repeatedly overwrite the sectors used by the now-deleted file with
>>"marching" patterns of 00-ffhex to frustrate data-restoring spies.
>>Most of them overwrite the entire file area at least 256 times...
>>BTW - "wipefile" programs do a much better job of "destroying evidence"
>>than even a low-level format, which can leave perceptible traces of
>>the original data intact, even if they aren't readable by normal means.
>>Even the old PCTOOLS software could "revitalize" a beat-up, unreadable
>>floppy.
John, I had an interesting experience last week on my 386sx/16 with an old
Quantum 120 meg that was thrown away by someone. I was doing a defrag of
this drive when something went terribly awry. I got an error message and I
think the system hung. I was either using MS Defrag or PCTools Compress.
Anyway I rebooted and ran CHKDSK which reported numerous errors. I ran
PCTools Diskfix program which repaird the 1st FAT and numerous other
errors. At some point Diskfix offered me the opportunity to search for
missing directories. I had never tried this before so I initiated this
option and after completing the test I found many directories containing
file names for programs which I had never put on the system, including
Windows 3.0 and many applications. These files were of 0 byte length and
since I was interested in cleaning up the drive I did not pursue them
further. I am almost sure I DOS formatted the drive when I started using it
as it has some bad sectors and is a bit noisy. Anyway I was surprised to
see this and it confirms to some extent that traces of your files do remain
on your disks even after formatting and extensive use.
Regards,
Dale Mentzer
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