Fdisk anyone?

[ohheck]

i was in a business today that was getting rid of some old pcs-
as soon as they "erased the memory" [why do people continually confuse ram with hard drive space?] }:|
so off the cuff i say "oh just fidisk"
"that's ef- dee-eye-ess-kay......."

anyway i really don't know for sure: will fdisk wipe out any and all traces of any and every thing on a hard drive?

 

[pyritechips]

Short answer: No.

Fdisk is a MS-DOS partitioning utility. It will rearange any and all partitions on a hard drive, but until the data on the drive is overwritten, it is retrievable. Under normal usage, the data is still on the drive but not accessable. There are forensic tools to retireve such data.

The only true methods of permanently erasing data is a "wipe", a low level format or physically destroying the drive platters.

 

[ohheck]

gee thanks for the fast answer-
yeah i have norton utilities and was suprised to find all the recoverable stuff that i thought was long gone...
are you saying "format c:" is better than fdisk?
i would have suggested a wipe util. but thought i would have been a bit complicated for them to work through-
so how DO you completely wipe out a disk?

 

[pyritechips]

Hello again!

Format utility is no better than fdisk for deleting data. If you have Norton Utilities look to see if they have "Wipe Info" on it. That is an excellent utility for wiping data. The one called "Government Wipe" takes a very long time but as indicated, wipes a hard drive to government standards.