Hello,

I have some old drives that i want to sell on an ebay like auction site, since i dont use them anymore, but they are too nice to just throw out. We are talking about raptor drives and drives in sizes of TBs, also a bunch of SCA2 drives...

I found a way to mount these drives via a USB based HDD docking station, throughwhich i am able from a windows computer to do anything with them (or as the software allows me to do)...

I downloaded LowLevelFormat tool from hddguru.com and also the HDDWipe tool from same - and using my regular find deleted partitions and files tools, they cant find anything. That is on the drives that has been used for NTFS based systems (i.e. windows), so i am happy that i dont throw (deleted) personal data in the hands of others. However i have now begun with the drives on which i have been running unix or linux even, so filesystems are UFS and EXT3.

The question:
Will the LLF and WIPE tools completely make all these filesystems vanish for good, or will software available outthere be able to find anything left from the old partitions that i ran?


Cheers,

Nothing at human level / human price can do nothing for getting data back after zerofill but also nothing can take away your worries .

Another quicker way is to use Security Erase and the drive will perform internal zero fill.

Best way would be factory selfscan but requires dedicated equipment and know how (p.s. I offer this kind of service for the large majority of drives available).

BlackST - While this is not of the normal data recovery world: I recall hearing that the military has some equipment that can read residual magnatism of the former information. Perhaps this is why a secure erase requires several different patterns written several times?. Can you substantiate such technology?

No.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_reman ... itten_data

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You don't have to backup all of your files, just the ones you want to keep.

THANKS Drc! Great link. It was the Gutmann method of recovery- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gutmann_method . Recovery on modern drives, as you stated, is not an option.

Man landed on moon in 1969 (40 years ago). Can we buy a round trip to the moon 40 years later with actual technology and market ? No. The argument was already discussed infinite times here and elsewhere + infinite copy/paste from THIS forum.

In synthesis : be serious, 90% of drives contain silly stuff: who the heck would be interested in spending a fortune in electronic microscopy and decoding servo/PRML pattern to see maybe a fragment of amateur video of bedroom action from unknown part of planet Earth ?

You can find stories on internet that says it is possible to recover data after wiping (zero fill ) hard drive. All those methods like Magnetic force microscopy are only for research and only ones who can do that is military or some universities. In those stories they show pictures before and after and lot of mathematical formulas but none of them don't tell you how much data (bits) they recover.