Andrew LB wrote:
shahij wrote:
OVERWRITTEN DATA LOST PERMANENTLY.
This is not entirely accurate. Because if it were true, all you'd need is a single pass to securely erase an HDD. There is a reason why it takes 4-6 random data wipe passes to properly do a government wipe. Btw... "government" wipe is a misnomer. Drives with classified , Secret, or Top secret data on them are not erased using traditional methods, they are put into a "degausser", which pretty much destroys any and all data stored on the HDD, as well as the controller, bios, and firmware chips. It's quick and very effective. It's kinda like a mini-EMP for your HDD.
I've been able to recovery data from drives that had the partition deleted, repartitioned, formatted, and had a new OS installed. I've had great luck with active@Partition recovery active@data recovery, ontrack, and R-studio.
A single pass is enough to completely and securely wipe all data on modern rotating hard drives. The DoD document you are most likely referring to is way too obsolete and "multiple pass wiping" was actually removed from subsequent versions of that document a long time ago.
NIST also clearly states in their sanitization recommendations that a single pass is enough.
Repartitioning, formatting or OS reinstall procedures do not really delete much from the disk, that is why you were able to recover data.