My Hard Drive Died #5 – Overwritten Hard Drives

My Hard Drive Died - Podnutz

Hosted by Steve Cherubino and Scott Moulton of MyHardDriveDied.com.

In this show we cover:

• Story about the Keynote at The Computer Forensic Show – www.techfusion.com

• Discussion about overwritten hard drives and how and why people think there is some magic machine that can recover data

• REDIRECTION of bad blocks leaving data on the hard drive that is not overwritten

• How you can properly overwrite current hard drives

Topics Discussed

• Computer Forensics Show‘s keynote speaker, described how overwritten data was restored, but the conference was not anywhere about that.
• Back in 80’s Drives worked like floppies making the recovery of overwritten data was maybe possible, with a very high error rate.
• Hard Drives that had been made about 10 years ago are a completely different thing, making it more impossible to recover overwritten data.
• An equipment called a Magnetic Microscope to try to recover data.
• An other equipment called Spin Stand to try to recover data.
• Disks have a “reserved area” to store information from the bad block, also called P-list
• A G-list is a list of bad blocks for the disk not to use them again.
• A good idea is to look for the S.M.A.R.T. results before the HD crashes.
• If there’s a S.M.A.R.T. warning it would be a good idea to change your drive.
• How to Properly Overwrite HD? Use the ATA Command to erase and overwrite HDs, doing a DoD sanitation.
• A program written by Dr. Gordon Hughes from the Center for Magnetic Recording Research
• A software tool used is Boot and Nuke (DBAN)
• Tools to recover data, PC300, Atola, among others.
• Data Recovery classes.
• Is it ok to freeze a Hard Drive? Scott says it’s not the best solution, it might cause damage the drive, but sometimes it might work.
• Maybe try the refrigerator first before the freezer, not to cause to big of a temperature change.
• Tip to use instead of freezing: use a USB cooler (small refrigerators) to cool the HD and keep it cool, Scott uses an aluminum bay and hook up a couple of these ceramic pieces to keep the HD cool.

Thanks, and out -click-

Show Notes by Luis Perez from GeekForce Guatemala