Recovering files from a overwriten HD - Impossible except on TV? :P

I think were talking about destroying it because illegal shit may be on it. Hence the 4chan partyvan img.

throwing it in your local canal wont work. As discovered in Prison Break series 2.

 

Theoretically you can read residual data from hard drives indirectly. If memory serves it involves extremely expensive equipment and even then overwriting the data may modify the residual bits. I'd wager that there isn't a single possible circumstance in the world that would make anyone want to expend the resources necessary to get any worthwhile data.

Now older drives (probably piss easy on a 20mb drive) would be easier to get data from. Floppy disks can be wiped completely with a magnet as can hard drives through what is called "degaussing". This erases any data on the drive as well as trashing formatting done at the factory making the drive worthless. Likely a magnetic field strong enough to do this might trash the controller on the drive as well.

Basically, phase change it from a solid into a liquid or degauss it to be absolutely sure. Overwriting it a few times with a DoD scheme should do it for anyone who isn't snooping for incriminating documents where evidence can't possibly exist in other forms.

 

What he said :evil:

Realistically though, just overwriting everything once is enough to keep most data recovery labs from getting anything back. So unless some governmental intelligence agency or suchlike wants to look through your CP, a simple "dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/hda" should be enough.

 

McAfee has a feature that can "shred" an entire disk or just certain files. I'm not quite sure how it works, but you can make up to 10 passes over the data and that destroys it better that just deleting it does.