Wow. Thanks axeman for the tutorial, I knew "fragments" of the inner workings but you put it all together. Chaos-- I try to stay away from too much shareware. pspr-- I know, I'm a little late to the party. Ever since I changed my hard drive out a little while back, I've had these burning questions. Kept me up at night. Thanks all. I now know more today than I did yesterday.
Here are a few tips to try to stay out of "hard drive hell". 1. Defrag is included in most recent Windows editions. In XP look in Start/Programs/Accessories/System Tools/Disk Defragmenter 2. In addition to a good, regularly updated anti-virus program you should run an anti-spy software such as Ad Aware. Spy software can really slow performance and might give others sensitive info about you. I suggest Norton or eTrust anti-virus software. I've had trouble with Mcaffee slowing my computers operation significantly. 3. Also, you should use a software firewall such as Zone Alarm or, better yet, use a network router with a hardware firewall between you and the Internet. This is an absolute must if you use a cable modem. 4. Windows XP Pro has a very good backup in the System Tools area. Be sure to use the "advanced" ASR backup so you have a complete backup of your hard drive. I do this weekly and back up my new data daily to a separate backup file using the other backup proceedure (not ASR). The easiest way to do these is to have a separate physical hard drive in your computer to make backups to. Hard drives are cheap these days. 5. Have Check Disk scan your hard drive periodically. In XP go to Start/Run and type in "chkdsk /r" without the quotes. The next time you boot up it will check your entire hard drive and files for flaws and mark any bad areas so they won't have files written to them. If it starts finding bad areas regularly, the drive is probably about to fail and should be replaced. (Although hard drives usually fail suddenly without warning) 6. And NEVER move your computer while it is running. This can crash your hard drive instantly if you are not lucky. Wally
If you do a low level format (write zeroes to the drive), are all traces of the data removed from the drive such that the data can not be read or recovered any recovery software?
No. If you must be absolutely certain that your disk is unreadable, the only thing to do is to destroy it. There are all sorts of wonderful(?) things folks can do with extremely high tech and piles of cash to get data that has been overwritten more than once. If you are a drug king-pin with records on his computer, you need a physical self-destruct mechanism, not just a soft one. Realistically though, for us (mostly) law abiding types, a reformat will stop pretty much anybody that would be interested in our data. It's pretty expensive to do the high end data retrieval.