Using the Ultimate Boot CD. It is full of programs designed to completely wipe out data from your hard drive, the 1 program I use from it is called Darek's Boot 'n Nuke, when you use it, it's like you just walked out of the store with a new hard drive, NOTHING can be recovered.
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If you are going to reinstall the OS, simply Reformat the hard drive. If however you are going to dispose of the hard drive, then drill 3 holes in the hard drive to permanently destroy it. If you are going to sell the hard drive there are programs you can download that will completely erase the hard drive. At least they claim to. If it were my hard drive and I had sensitive data on it, I would not sell it under any circumstances. There are ways to get data off any hard drive unless it has been destroyed.
Yes, any type of virus has the potential to destroy a hard drive.
Yes, Surely it will remove everything on hard drive. Formatting a hard drive means to remove everything on hard drive. If you are formatting only a specific drive like C:\ or D:\ then the data in only that drive will be removed.
It is possible that dropping a laptop can destroy its hard drive. But it depends on the type of hard drive it used and how hard it drops. It is very possible that if you drop it hard enough to damage its hard drive that you may cause other damage.
Today's computer forensics allow for data to be recovered from hard drives even after they have been erased and written over. To fully insure that corporate secrets are not made available to competitors, the best safety is to physically destroy the hard drive.
You should NEVER unplug your hard drive with your computer still powered on. It will destroy the drive.
Either delete it, or physically destroy the disk.
You can get assistance with hard drive recovery from CP4.com. They are a professional data recovery company that will assist you with recovering your hard drive and lost data.
Data can be stored on floppy disk, hard disk, memory stick, CD or DVD.
Soft data is stored on a data disk or hard drive. Where as hard data is printed.
A hard drive data recovery port is called just that. It is a port used to recover lost data from a hard drive prior to it being overwritten by the drive. Do not attempt to do this alone unless you are a professional as you will likely lose your data.