[Full-Disclosure] Re: [OT] Hard drive recovery (WAS CoolWebSearch)

From: Andrew Farmer (andfarm_at_teknovis.com)
Date: 07/31/04

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    To: John Kinsella <jlk@thrashyour.com>
Date: Fri, 30 Jul 2004 18:42:04 -0700

    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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