full-disclosure - Re: [OT] Hard drive recovery (WAS CoolWebSearch)

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From: andfarm at teknovis.com (Andrew Farmer)
Subject: Re: [OT] Hard drive recovery (WAS CoolWebSearch)

On 30 Jul 2004, at 18:01, John Kinsella wrote:
> On Fri, Jul 30, 2004 at 05:35:46PM -0400, Raj Varada wrote:
>> Did you really mean "whatever can be done can be UNdone"?
>> How about a format C:? (I haven't seen "unformat" in a very long 
>> time.)
>
> Data can be read off a hard drive until it's been written over like
> what...8 times IIRC?  So, in theory, one "format C:" can be undone. ;)

Well, DOS format doesn't overwrite anything but the metadata by 
default. So
that's pretty easy to undo as long as you have some idea of how data 
was laid
out.

If you're talking about overwritten data, though, you can't recover 
wiped
data without a cleanroom, specialized equipment, and a LOT of time -
especially with newer hard drives, as bit sizes shrink and on-drive 
error
correction and compression get more complex.
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