Ways to speed up your computer....

[Nick]

I believe there is no way of getting the data back if the drive is formatted even from just a W98 boot disk.

Umm... No. This is simply not the case - its easy to trawl the free space on a hard drive and to reconstruct a very good part of the data - there are many many tools (some free) to do this, even if you think you have over-written the data.

I have to have drives destroyed beyond forensic recovery as a small part of my job - the drives contain trading information from major merchant banks and client information.

I used to shoot the drives with a 12bore, but that is actually not a very good way of rendering them unreadable (see attached photo of one I prepared earlier). HDs are actually surprisingly tough...

I then spent time with a forensic data recovery laboratory that does "stuff" for the security services & police - a real eye-opener. Given enough money, a clean room, an electron microscope etc., they can recover data from almost anything - phones & disks that have been shredded. Disks that have been supposedly "security wiped". The security industry is full of FUD (Fear, Uncertainty & Doubt), and many products are pure snake-oil, but these guys were very very good indeed.

Nowadays I get all our drives shredded by the same people the police use - turns the hd into kitty-litter!