tosh.hdd wrote:
Hey,
first of all I´d like to say that there is no really valuable data on my hdd in question. Nevertheless, i would appreciate your technical opinion (as I am not very competent in this context)
Recently, i erased my HDD using DBAN. Erasing worked fine, also the drive did not report any error before or showd any signs of malfunction in Usage before.
The drive contained some personal important data (financial/personal), thus i made the efford using dban before deposing the drive. Also, the HDD was quite new (2TB). Furthermore, I did some damage to the SATA/Power-Pins to prevent reuse/repair of the drive.
After this, i realized that even dban is no perfect method - assuming there were bad sectors on physical level, dban would not have erased them. While using google a bit, I came cross the statement that the HDD firmware erroneously can map even functional sectors as bad ones sometimes. Consequently, it is possible that personal data is still on the drive.
As said above, the controller is damaged. On the other Hand, Hardware gets repaired and refurbished. I dont think thats beeing done in this case. However, if it is easy to swap a ne controller-pcb to the drive - are the contents of unerased sectors now on the accessible HDD space?
As far as I understand, the Drive Firmware has a list containing all Bad sectors and their location (G-List). As long as the drive follows this list, the hdd ignores these sectors on hardware level and my data would be safe from other normal users. Would it also be safe if the controller-pcb is replaced? Or could the G-List information be lost and therefore the data be visible?
(I know that its even possible to access bad blocks contents ignoring firmware barriers in a lab - but as I have only normal personal data on my disk, no one would spend so much money on this i think. Nevertheless, I dont feel so comfortable realizing that dban isnt as secure as i thought.
regards,
Greg
My man, just open the drive and slam it with a hammer. No one will bother to recover after your first DBAN run.
_________________
BTC Wallet - 3AoQPTBsz9PbfoanCx44Lw76Y2TwtKa1x5
Instagram https://www.instagram.com/datarecovery_morde.pt/