formating disk

[Guest]

Hello,
I heard that after formatting disk during Windows 2000 installation we can
still recover some files on the disk. Is this true? If yes, what does
actually formation do?
Thanks,
Jim.

 

[John John]

Yes, that is true. Good data recovery software can recover files on
formated and fdisked drives. Formating remove the file index or
rewrites the File Allocation Table. Because Windows sees no file index
it thinks that there are no files on the drive, in reality the files are
still there, but Windows sees the disk space a available and just writes
new files over the old ones. Sort of like... if you took the numbers
off the houses on your street and then the property assessor would think
that because there are no numbers on the houses there must be no houses,
and no tax bill. Nice try! Or city hall would say that the lots are
vacant so someone else would just demolish a house on a lot and build a
new one on the same spot... with a new number on the house.

You have to "wipe" the drive if you want to erase the drive. Wiping
writes zeros and ones all over the drive so that the files become
unreadable.

John

 

[Guest]

how do you wipe the drive?

Yes, that is true. Good data recovery software can recover files on
formated and fdisked drives. Formating remove the file index or
rewrites the File Allocation Table. Because Windows sees no file index
it thinks that there are no files on the drive, in reality the files are
still there, but Windows sees the disk space a available and just writes
new files over the old ones. Sort of like... if you took the numbers
off the houses on your street and then the property assessor would think
that because there are no numbers on the houses there must be no houses,
and no tax bill. Nice try! Or city hall would say that the lots are
vacant so someone else would just demolish a house on a lot and build a
new one on the same spot... with a new number on the house.

You have to "wipe" the drive if you want to erase the drive. Wiping
writes zeros and ones all over the drive so that the files become
unreadable.

John

 

[John John]

You use wiping utility. Heidi is one of the best available and free!
http://www.heidi.ie/eraser/

You should be aware that wiping hard drives is a time consuming process,
the bigger the drive the longer the process. The software has to
overwrite every space on the drive and to be secure it usually does it 3
times over, more if you want to but 3 times should suffice. It will
take many hours to do its job.

John