There are several ways to recover the information if all you do is reformat or repartition the drive. Heck, DOS (remember DOS?) used to include an "unformat" utility.
See for example: http://www.runtime.org/gdb.htm http://foremost.sourceforge.net/ http://www.drivesavers.com/ The last one (DriveSavers) can even take the drive apart in a clean room and try to recover data directly from the platters, for a price. Of course, it's a fairly /high/ price :) You have to decide for yourself if someone "might" be willing to spend that much to recover data from your drive, and if it's worth it to you to prevent them from doing so. In my case, it's always worth it: my hard drive might have tax files, Gnucash files, source code from contracting projects, and who knows what else on it, and DBAN is free and easy to use. - Gary > -----Original Message----- > From: Matthew Pittard [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > Sent: Thursday, July 03, 2003 12:50 > To: 'BYU Unix Users Group' > Subject: RE: [uug] Scrub the hard Drive clean > > > How could someone access the information if you just reformat the > hard drive? Especially if you reformat it to a different file system > like NTFS? > > Matt > > -----Original Message----- > From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > On Behalf Of Gary Thornock > Sent: Wednesday, September 03, 2003 10:09 AM > To: BYU Unix Users Group > Subject: Re: [uug] Scrub the hard Drive clean > > > One of the things that Eraser will do for you is create a DBAN > (Darik's Boot And Nuke) boot disk. Of course, you can also download > a floppy image or an iso from dban.sourceforge.net, as someone else > already pointed out. > > There are several ways to wipe a hard drive (you might, for > instance, boot Knoppix and run "shred /dev/hda" -- I've used that > one before and it works fairly well). DBAN is probably the easiest > method around, and it's secure enough for anyone who doesn't need to > grind the platters into dust or melt them down :) > > - Gary ____________________ BYU Unix Users Group http://uug.byu.edu/ ___________________________________________________________________ List Info: http://uug.byu.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/uug-list
