Negative99 » Department of Defense http://negative99.com An onslaught of expository excellence covering web design and development, politics and current events, faith and religion, guitar and music, programming... oh, and anything else. Wed, 06 Jul 2011 03:22:47 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3 Flirting With Information Death http://negative99.com/electrons/flirting-with-information-death/ http://negative99.com/electrons/flirting-with-information-death/#comments Sun, 07 Dec 2008 14:33:09 +0000 WarAxe http://negative99.com/?p=658 hard drive internalsSo I just nearly wiped my entire hard drive using a DoD-certified data deletion algorithm. I know, I know… I just got done with computer troubles.

I was trying to clean an external drive for possible giveaway, and needed to ensure no info could be resurrected off said device. Unfortunately, when I began this process (using a Linux boot environment I wasn’t familiar with) it appeared that there were two hard drives detected: my main drive and this little external drive. Well… I was wrong, because as soon as I started the wipe the little external drive sat dormant while my main hard drive light came on full indicating IT was the device being wiped! Oops! :-(

Well… a quick power-down and some sweet, open-source recovery software later I managed to rebuild the partition by rebuilding the master file table through deep file detection… rebuild the master boot record through the backup boot record which was safely undeleted after the master file record was recovered… and ultimately restore my machine from utter oblivion. Props to the Ultimate Boot CD for carrying TestDisk and NTFS Boot Partition.

But be careful with Darik’s Boot and Nuke. In the future I know I will. :-)

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