On 1999-02-17 [EMAIL PROTECTED] said:
>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
Hi,
I used Fdisk and deletted all the partitions, and rebooted did a directory
on c:,
got an invalid drive, and ran fdisk and created primary dos partition.
and the files wore still there and usable.
I didn't do any thing between the two fdisk sessions.
So the data is stil there unless you demagnatise it or otherwise destroy
it.
Pete
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