Core Data Recovery

Archive for March, 2011

A few of you out there have been asking me for how to wipe a hard disk for computer donation,
You can use a bootable nuke disk to wipe the drive and OS in one boot and answer a couple of questions ensuring you wish to toast your hard disk, but if you want to give that laptop to little Johnny, or Sue to use for school and you want to leave your OS intact it becomes more difficult.

Instructions for white space wiping and reasons for this:

If you wish to wipe the data from a partition, Simply delete all the information you wish to destroy, remove all internet caches, delete all history, and all temporary folders, a good program for this is ccleaner from ccleaner.com.

Then download TrueCrypt, and make a file container as big as the rest of the hard drive that is empty.
Once complete, you will have overwritten your data with an encrypted empty drive, thus destroying any file handles and other objects.
Then delete the file container you created.

If you do this 3 times, it’s almost impossible to retrieve anything from the drive, however with an electron scanning microscope, or a special hard disk circuit board and a good head eschew program it is still possible to retrieve latent data from the edges of your overwritten data.