On Wed, 18 Jun 1997, Christian Hudon wrote: > On Jun 18, Rick Macdonald wrote > > > > Well, you could overwrite the file with gibberish _before_ deleting it. > > I think that's what Norton does, several times if I remember correctly. > > That's to comply with US federal regs, which seem a bit superstitious to > > me! Actually, the giberrish itself is probably some specified bit pattern. > > Actually it's not superstition at all. I think you can still recover a file > that's been overwritten once with zeroes... just open the HD (in a clean > room, of course) and read off the sectors with a electron microscope (or
I think the older Norton manuals explained the "government wipe" in greater detail. The one I have now doesn't say how many repeats, only that a fast wipe of one pass of zeros takes a few seconds on a 1.44MB floppy, whereas a government wipe takes about two hours. It says the "last character" used has to be decimal 246. I wonder if there are government employees who make a living scraping ones and zeros off erased disks... Anyway, I think the asker of the question got his answer, and I need to break out a dictionary next time I go to write the word "gibberish"! ...RickM... -- TO UNSUBSCRIBE FROM THIS MAILING LIST: e-mail the word "unsubscribe" to [EMAIL PROTECTED] . Trouble? e-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] .
