Data that can never be erased on hard drive?

Computer Help and Discussions The Lounge
1

I used CCleaner and found out that you have to delete firefox and chrome since they act like a cover over the areas of the hard drive that you want cleaned. If you don't delete them then lots of files won't be overwritten. You may have to delete other programs too. I found this out since I used Recuva and the files I wanted permanently erased were still there. Once firefox and chrome were removed from my PC I ran CCleaner a second time and then I used Recuva a second time and the files were gone.

Then I used a program called disk investigator and I found out that some files were still recoverable by using the internet links found in the disk clusters on the hard drive. You just have to know what word to search for and you will get list and those list will contain internet links and other sensitive information. If you search for "downloader, jpg, .com, etc..." it will pull up a lot of what you have been doing on your pc even after running CCleaner multiple times. Is their any way to permanent clean the hard drive so that even disk investigator can't recover the information?

2

short answer; No.

reason - given the right software, time and motivation, someone can always recover something.

dispite your method to erase your drive, some info will be retrieved.

will that be a whole file, a complete picture, a web address?, of course not, but will it be incriminating? there's no way to know until tested.

(obviously if your disk erasing method is a 10lb hammer, then the short answer becomes Yes :) )

3

Back when I was in the workforce, the company I worked for regularly traded in various computer based equipment, PC's, input/output devices etc. and in all cases traded units from the Defence Department never included any hard disc drives or RAM. These items were removed prior to hand-over to my company and incinerated.................completely destroyed. This is the only way to permanently delete/destroy data. :ph34r: