Just wondering.........

Hello manicd, Well the short answer is - the files don't 'go' anywhere. To quote Wikipedia: "As with regular deletion, data on a disk is not fully destroyed during a high-level format. Instead, the area on the disk containing the data is merely marked as available (in whatever file system structure the format uses), and retains the old data until it is overwritten.". Basically the areas of the hard drive that contain files are marked as available space. When you format the disk, files it contained before still exist, until you randomly overwrite the old data with a new program/file. To prevent recovery, "data must either be completely overwritten (every sector) with random data before the format, or the format program itself must perform this overwriting". Hope this helps Rich

Hey manicd,

There's not much more I can add to what rharrison has said. If you're wanting to completely format a drive so that all the information is gone, or at least very difficult to retrieve, I suggest using something like Kill Disk :

http://www.killdisk.com/

I used it a few years ago when selling a laptop. You can create a bootable CD of it and it will rewrite your hardisk with random data, or 1's and 0's. It depends which option you choose really.

If you're trying to recover deleted files then it might be worth sending it to a data recovery specialist. That can be quite pricey though, and doing it yourself could be a bit tricky. There are free 3rd party tools around, but I wouldn't be able to confidently vouch for any of them. I'm sure some of the experts here have a few suggestions in that area.

good information from both of you rharrison and nahumi.
thanks for helping.

If manicd replies, we may have a better idea of where this topic is going and whether or not any further help is required.

Best Regards

Hello manicd,



To quote Wikipedia: "As with regular deletion, data on a disk is not fully destroyed during a high-level format. Instead, the area on the disk containing the data is merely marked as available (in whatever file system structure the format uses), and retains the old data until it is overwritten.". Basically the areas of the hard drive that contain files are marked as available space.

When you format the disk, files it contained before still exist, until you randomly overwrite the old data with a new program/file. To prevent recovery, "data must either be completely overwritten (every sector) with random data before the format, or the format program itself must perform this overwriting".

Very informative…Thanks a ton!!