Re: Recover drive from single pass wipe

From: Bill Unruh (unruh_at_string.physics.ubc.ca)
Date: 01/06/05 

Date: 6 Jan 2005 20:08:29 GMT

San Diego Guy <sandiegguy@*remove*yahoo.com> writes:

>Well.. don't know if this is the right group for this, but here it goes.

>I was wiping some PCs at work with Active@ Killdisk.. the free version
>lets you do a single pass disk wipe.

>Now it turns out that one of the wiped PCs is still needed by some users
>and I need to restore it. I'd like to restore the entire drive, but at
>least some of the data on it.

Is it worth 100,000 dollars? That is probably what you would need to spend,
and weeks of work, to recover even parts of the disk.

>I've tried several freeware utilities, but none of then can find the
>partition to work with and allow me to recover data.

You cannot. The only way to recover from even a single passwipe is to
disassemble the drive and to scan the disk with an STM and try to recover
info from the edges of the tracks. Not guarenteed.
The purpose of the program is to completely erase the material. YOu
completely erased the material. NOw you want it back? Did you read anything
about the program before you used it? Or did you just think that they were
completely incompetent or fraudsters?

>Could someone let me know of a good utility that can recover data from a
>single pass wipe?

>The drive had one partition that was formatted with NTFS.
>Killdisk does a single pass wipe, writing all 0s.

See above. With unlimited finances, the data can possibly be recovered. Do
you have unlimited finances?

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