Overwritten.net
Community => General Discussion => Topic started by: Pugnate on Monday, June 08, 2009, 08:07:42 AM
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Hey guys. To keep it concise, my harddrive flew out of my computer case (don't ask) 4 feet through the air, and hit center first a metal weight plate on the side of a barbell in my room.
WHAACCCCKKKKKKKK
So I reattached the damn thing, and kept getting a "HARD DRIVE ERROR" message at startup, which took about 2 minutes to process, all the while I could hear HRRRRRMM HRRRRRRMM HRRRRRM sounds every time.
Anyway I took it to the store today and they tried a gazillion hard drive programs, but the drive just won't post. The computer tries, but all we get is the whirling sound.
Since I bought the thing 4 months ago, I am going to send it in warranty to WD Singapore, and apparently they will send a new one back.
What the problem is that I had a lot of sensitive documents on the drive, most of which are related to my business and aren't really encrypted.
So I am kinda nervous. When I send the drive in, will they wipe it automatically? I am a bit nervous about this info getting out or whatever.
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I would think they would wipe it, but if they don't have a guarantee about data integrity all you really have is hope.
The alternative is to smash the thing with a sledgehammer and buy a new drive. After all, they are extremely cheap these days.
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Well, according to the guy at the store, there is no way in hell they will be able to read the contents of the drive? He said whirling sound came from the center of the drive, which meant the data was most definitely lost? Does that sound plausible? He also said that WD would wipe the drive instead of exploring the contents.
I am considering your option though.
Just found this on WD:
FAQ What happens to the data on the drive I sent in for replacement and can I retrieve it?
Answer
Customer confidentiality is a priority to Western Digital. When a drive is received at our facility, it is put through a rigorous testing process for analysis. During this process, all data on the drive is completely erased, and therefore irrecoverable.
Consequently, if you need to recover the data on the drive, you must do so before returning the drive to us. As was stated in the above paragraph, once we receive the drive, all data is completely erased and irrecoverable. If you need data recovery, please click on the link below for a list of WD data recovery partners. Once they recover your data, you can then send the drive in for replacement.
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Well, according to the guy at the store, there is no way in hell they will be able to read the contents of the drive? He said whirling sound came from the center of the drive, which meant the data was most definitely lost? Does that sound plausible? He also said that WD would wipe the drive instead of exploring the contents.
I have heard the following things about hard drives and data integrity, which may or may not be myths:
- Data can be recovered from pre-existing partitons even after a fresh format.
- Passing a magnet over the hard drive is not enough. A regular consumer can't buy a magnet strong enough to truly erase a hard drive and make it 100% irrecoverabe.
- Data can be recovered from hard drives where the even the DoD 5220.22-M data wiping algorithm was used.
- Data can recovered from hard drives burned in a fire.
That said, data recovery in one of the above situations would require specialized computer forensics equipment, except for the first point where something like GetDataBack for NTFS could be employed.
I would say that quote you posted should leave you at rest. If you are truly concerned about the privacy of your data you would need to run dban, burn it in a fire, put it in an MRI machine, and smash it with a sledgehammer. That way even high-tech first world governments' intelligence agencies would not be able to recover it. Otherwise you are just going to have to trust WD.
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It sucks that you lost all of your
goat porn sensitive documents.
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Scott, thanks for the reply. Very interesting info. Yes, the WD thing set my mind at ease.
And Ghandi, when I saw that you posted a reply, I immediately knew what it would be about.
In other news, I actually lost all those... nature videos you sent me in an accident.
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I actually had to deal with this several months ago, when one of my Seagate Barracudas died. I hadn't bothered with any encryption, and I didn't feel comfortable RMAing a drive with other people's data still on it. I ended up just keeping the drive and buying a replacement out of pocket. That said, I was almost certainly just being paranoid. You probably shouldn't worry, for the following reasons:
- Western Digital isn't a sixteen year old at Best Buy. They are real professionals, and a major part of being professional is "don't do shit that will obviously piss off your customers, especially when there is no clear benefit to doing so." They have no interest in seeing your data, and they're probably to busy to deal with it anyway, since they're a high-volume manufacturer in a cutthroat market.
- Related to the previous point, it would destroy Western Digital's reputation if they got caught snooping on customers. Once again, they're professionals, and I'm sure they've thought of this. Securing customer data is a fairly obvious precaution for them to take.
- I have heard numerous stories of data being lost by mouth-breathing office workers forgetting their laptops. I have never heard of data being lost as a result of an RMA process with a reputable manufacturer.
- If the drive can't be read via software, then the only way to get data off it would be to disassemble the hardware. This tends to be ridiculously expensive (many times the cost of the drive), and I seriously doubt WD wants to pay for this every time they get a drive RMAed.
If you're still worried, I suggest you get a really strong magnet (like neodymium) and manually degauss the drive. If you do that, no one will be reading your data without busting out an MRI.
- Data can be recovered from pre-existing partitons even after a fresh format.
True, at least if you do a quick format. Reiser FS (a Linux filesystem named after famed spousal murderer Hans Reiser) actually had the hilarious problem that files could remain on the filesystem even after a format (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reiser_fs#fsck), meaning for instance that a particularly nasty virus could infect a partition in such a way that not even an ordinary reformat is guaranteed to get rid of it.
- Passing a magnet over the hard drive is not enough. A regular consumer can't buy a magnet strong enough to truly erase a hard drive and make it 100% irrecoverabe.
They use neodymium magnets in hard drives. You can buy those with a little effort, and evidently they are strong enough to erase hard drives, because that's how hard drives work. I have no idea if the data would be 100% unrecoverable, though.
- Data can be recovered from hard drives where the even the DoD 5220.22-M data wiping algorithm was used.
That's contrary to what I've heard. Supposedly, even a single overwrite with random data will make hard drives unrecoverable even with a magnetic resonance imager. And according to Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_remanence#Feasibility_of_recovering_overwritten_data), the NIST agrees. (Caveat: most drives have extra sectors that they use in case existing sectors go bad. If you write confidential data to a sector, and then that sector goes bad, you will not be able to overwrite that data by ordinary means, although a computer forensics kit or MRI might be able to read it.)
- Data can recovered from hard drives burned in a fire.
Depends on the temperature. A hard drive heated above its Curie point (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curie_point) for any significant length of time will be 100% unrecoverable.
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Haha, I knew you'd show up eventually. Interesting information. Like I said it's stuff that I'd heard; I had not checked out the validity of the statements and stated so.
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Yea, that's very interesting info. W&C.