[rescue] nuking from orbit

[Jeremy Nielson]

> > > This is ridiculous.  1 low-level format/verify pass from a real
> > utility, and
> > > the data's GONE...  Forever.
> >
> >You've never seen REAL data recovery professionals at work, then.
> >The only TRUE way to make SURE that its gone, is to grind the disk
> >into powder.
>
> I have to agree with Bill here. I've briefly gotten to use a hardware data
> recovery unit that you pull the circuitboard of fthe drive and hook this
> units electronics up to.... Took a drive that had been "destructively"
> written to with a random pattern of gibberish 12 different times and this
> unit was able to recover a good portion of the data from the media.  this
> was back on an old MFM drive, and as I understand it, with the right
> hardware and pulling the platters out of the bubble, there's almost a 90%
> recovery rate with some of hte newer hardware recovery units out there.
> they are expensive as hell, so generally only dedicated data recovery
> companies and governments have them.

Now what really sucked, was when the exhaust fan on an external SCSI case
went out, and we essentially fried the drives... We sent the drives to some
major Data Recovery company, who said that they could retrieve 0% of the
data... something about a head collision, and such... So apparently they
still hook the drive electronics up to something to read the data...

Just my 2cents... the information out there on data recovery, remnance, and
such is actually pretty interesting.

Jeremy Nielson