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May 11, 2005 at 4:12 am #18275CarriemeawayplzMember
Is it true that no matter how many times you reformat, that someone can rearrange certain ” numbers” ( I do not know the correct terms ) and find out what you’ve had or have on your computer ?
To explain things further, Our local news reported a story of a woman who had music on her computer dating back to 2001 and she is being sued now for 48,000.00 over this music . Apparently it was in her private files.
I had always assumed that once you reformat that everything on your computer was wiped out or deleted. Is it still there just kind of hidden? Is there a way to complete erase everything that has ever been on your computer, stopping short of buying a new one?
I had also assumed that people could only get into your personal files if you ” shared ” it with them. Am I correct or am I living in a rose colored world?
I just don’t understand how they can trace this woman back so many years if she did not or is not sharing files. Can someone explain this to me ?
May 11, 2005 at 4:39 am #121581EEDOKMemberwell first off when you delete something on a PC it’s not really gone, the index is just changed to have a delete flag. In short if you know what you’re doing in DOS you can undelete files(there’s even gui tools to do this). As for how do you browse unshared files, well have you ever read the TOS of your favorite p2p client?
May 11, 2005 at 6:34 am #121579CarriemeawayplzMemberEEDOK wrote:well first off when you delete something on a PC it’s not really gone, the index is just changed to have a delete flag. In short if you know what you’re doing in DOS you can undelete files(there’s even gui tools to do this). As for how do you browse unshared files, well have you ever read the TOS of your favorite p2p client?Well I have yahoo messenger and msn messenger and windows media player.. If you mean these are p2p.. I have skimmed their tos yes.. but I guess I meant this.. My sister n law has bearshare.. They pay a price each year for their subscription.. Is she doing anything illegal? Meaning since she is paying for that is she breaking the law by downloading songs?
May 11, 2005 at 6:45 am #121583TigerbladeParticipantthere are programs that can completely wipe the hard drive clean. we have a “death disc of love” floppy disc that, if the computer is started with that disc in the drive, within five seconds it will start to erase, bit by bit, every piece of data on the drive. then when it finishes, it starts over. three times. by the time it’s completely done, it’s wiped the drive clean three times and there is nothing at all to recover. short of doing that, you can recover files off the drive.
while she may be paying money for bearshare, she’s being ripped off, because file-sharing is still illegal. if she’s willing to pay money for music, she may as well switch to iTunes and pay $0.99 per song and have it be legal.
May 11, 2005 at 10:22 am #121578DJHyperbyteMemberHave a look at this thread and try to search before you post. 🙂
May 11, 2005 at 7:42 pm #121582EEDOKMemberso I’m not crazy about thinking I saw this thread before..
May 12, 2005 at 3:14 am #121580CarriemeawayplzMemberTigerblade wrote:there are programs that can completely wipe the hard drive clean. we have a “death disc of love” floppy disc that, if the computer is started with that disc in the drive, within five seconds it will start to erase, bit by bit, every piece of data on the drive. then when it finishes, it starts over. three times. by the time it’s completely done, it’s wiped the drive clean three times and there is nothing at all to recover. short of doing that, you can recover files off the drive.while she may be paying money for bearshare, she’s being ripped off, because file-sharing is still illegal. if she’s willing to pay money for music, she may as well switch to iTunes and pay $0.99 per song and have it be legal.
Tiger- about this death disc of love floppy disc.. is this something you made yourself or something someone can get or buy? I am interested in it . Sounds like aside from music that would be a security measure that one might consider for different occassions. How might one make or buy this disc you speak of ?
As for why she doesn’t pay the 99 cents for it.. the only answer I have is she is 13 and its impossible to tell a teenager anything. But I am the one who fixes her computer problems and I was/ am concerned with what she is doing on it . So that is why I asked.
And since you referred to the other article it only raises another question for me …. Since most computers come with the operating system installed on them already. How would one completely format without the original manufaturers discs?
May 31, 2005 at 2:57 pm #121586Jon8RFCMemberI used to go through a long and annoying process of pulling the hard drive from the computer, connecting it to another machine, then using NAV to wipe it out. Brian posted a program that can run from floppy or cd with different measures of wiping the drive. I love it!
http://middleman.krunchsoftware.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=2890&st=0&#entry25010
For my sister’s computer, I was using the normal mode (I think) which took about 1.5 hours running from floppy on a SATA 80gig drive. I wanted everything gone completely. If I wanted to hide my tracks, then I’d go for one of the more robust options…once or twice.
May 31, 2005 at 10:03 pm #121587m3rcyMemberI’m not too sure but i’ve seen on csi that data can be recoverd from a formatted hard drive 😛
May 31, 2005 at 10:24 pm #121584TigerbladeParticipantCarriemeawayplz wrote:Tiger- about this death disc of love floppy disc.. is this something you made yourself or something someone can get or buy? I am interested in it . Sounds like aside from music that would be a security measure that one might consider for different occassions. How might one make or buy this disc you speak of ?as far as i know, you can’t. it was something my roommate this last year at school had for work (he worked at the computer help desk on campus) when they needed to completely wipe out a computer before they sold it at the surplus auction. i’m sure there are commercial varieties… i should have had him make me a copy of it, but only one computer in my house has a floppy drive on it, so it wouldnt really be worth it. i’ll see if i can find a copy of it, or get him to send me a zip file with the disc’s contents.June 1, 2005 at 1:14 am #121585dreadMemberWebroot has a product that will make a floppy or cd to do that http://www.webroot.com/products/windowwasher so does ontrack one of my favorite companies http://www.ontrack.com/dataeraser/. http://www.heidi.ie/eraser/ is a free one. Here is a list of some programs that can view and/or bring back formated data http://www.snapfiles.com/Shareware/system/swdatarecovery.html and some free ones http://www.snapfiles.com/freeware/system/fwdatarecovery.html. There is more free and paid programs that will securly get rid of data, you just have to look around like on google or snapfiles in the freeware or shareware section for their deletion software. That goes for any site like snapfiles tucows download.com etc.. Might want to check out some forums to like http://wilderssecurity.com/ or http://security-forums.com/ and look or ask there to. There is also programs that are not ment to erase the whole drive but just temp files and you cant recover the temp files like http://www.east-tec.com/ east-tec has something to do harddrives to, http://www.whitecanyon.com/secureclean-clean-hard-drive.php whitecanyon aslo has programs to completly wipe your drive. There is software and hardware recovery methods to get back data. http://www.east-tec.com talks about the different levels of wipes you can do. http://www.10ts.com/hd-erase.htm. Cant find a site that list all the different types if you was to download the trial of east-tec you could see them all there is several here is some http://www.qdsecurity.com/securitystore/swipe-delstandards.html. http://www.whitecanyon.com/wipedrive-wipe-hard-drive.php list some more. Here is some reading http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/ http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/secure_del.html http://www.cerberussystems.com/INFOSEC/stds/sanitize.htm http://all.net/books/standards/remnants/standards.html
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