I had believed that a hard drive could be securely erased by multiple over-writes with random bit patterns, such that not even the NSA could salvage anything useful. Chuck, when you said "Not so", you made me sit up in surprise. I am genuinely curious. Could you refer us to technical articles that explain how experts can retrieve data from drives that have been subjected to rigorous shredding (eg, with utilities such as DBAN http://www.dban.org/)? (If indeed that is your claim.) Hoping to avoid a flamewar -- Dean At 10/1/2010 11:38 AM, T L wrote: >It is logically impossible for Tony to prove a negative, but all you'd have to do is one current reference to show that you're not just blowing smoke. Care to do so? > >Thomas > >>On Oct 1, 2010 4:51 AM, "Chuck Cole" <<mailto:cncole at earthlink.net>cncole at earthlink.net> wrote: >> >>> -----Original Message----- >>> From: <mailto:tclug-list-bounces at mn-linux.org>tclug-list-bounces at mn-linux.org >>> [mailto:<mailto:tclug-list-bounces at mn.>tclug-list-bounces at mn... >> >>> Sent: Friday, October 01, 2010 2:59 AM >>> To: TCLUG Mailing List >>> Subject: Re: [tclug-list] Hidden... >> >>> Show me evidence that this can be done. All of that residual waveform >>> stuff is no longer detect... >>Too hard. You show evidence that it cannot, including all variants of >>platter imaging. Didn't say the drive "as delivered" could do it. I worked >>in the most advanced read/write end of the industry doing modeling, etc.. If >>you have, you probably wouldn't ask. If you haven't you might not have the >>PRML analysis, head design variant knowledge, knowledge of excess written >>space in data imaging on tracks, and spin stand background to follow the >>evidence. Didn't say it was easy or cheap. Did say it isn't trivial. >> >>Chuck