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Ramlag · Mar 21st, 2005, 1:16 AM

If you use your hardisk a lot i believe that once the file is deleted eventually you'll overwite the location of any info thats there anyway.

I also believe that when you get people like forensics who try to recover information from a hard disk they check for anomolies at the byte level reading either a 1 or a 0 ect... if you really wanna clear a hardisk completely you need to like somone else said overwrite all the indiviual bytes as 1's or 0's ... a few times... like.

First time... = 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0
Second time = 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1
Third time... = 1 1 0 0 1 1 0 0
Fourth time = 0 0 1 1 0 0 1 1

Ect, or throw in a few random ones... even this way its still recoverable if not done enough times, but expect them to spend a LOT of cash trying to recover it. Still the best way is allways the magnet ... followed by a sledge hammer followed by some sort of home made napalm if you are that worried.

You could however if you are using windows run defrag a few times to group stuff together, find the adresses of the "empty" spaces and fill those full of 1's and 0's (carefull with the windows swap file if you do that, a 100% full hard disk is quite annoying).

Mar 21st, 2005, 1:16 AM	#9
Ramlag Newbie Join Date: Mar 2005 Posts: 18 Rep Power: 0	If you use your hardisk a lot i believe that once the file is deleted eventually you'll overwite the location of any info thats there anyway. I also believe that when you get people like forensics who try to recover information from a hard disk they check for anomolies at the byte level reading either a 1 or a 0 ect... if you really wanna clear a hardisk completely you need to like somone else said overwrite all the indiviual bytes as 1's or 0's ... a few times... like. First time... = 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 Second time = 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 Third time... = 1 1 0 0 1 1 0 0 Fourth time = 0 0 1 1 0 0 1 1 Ect, or throw in a few random ones... even this way its still recoverable if not done enough times, but expect them to spend a LOT of cash trying to recover it. Still the best way is allways the magnet ... followed by a sledge hammer followed by some sort of home made napalm if you are that worried. You could however if you are using windows run defrag a few times to group stuff together, find the adresses of the "empty" spaces and fill those full of 1's and 0's (carefull with the windows swap file if you do that, a 100% full hard disk is quite annoying).