[GRLUG] Data wiping / recovery / paranoia

[Tim Schmidt]

On 9/15/06, Michael Mol <mikemol at gmail.com> wrote:
> I've heard about tools that allow you to remap that reserved area of
> some hard drives as part of the LBA-accessible range.  I don't know
> their names, though. (I read about it on Slashdot back when
> overclocking was all the rage, and the run-above-spec attitude was
> being applied to components other than the processor, FSB and PCI
> bus.)
>
> It stands to reason that one could then fashion a tool that would wipe
> those areas of those drives.

Possibly with non-standard ATA commands, but as far as I know
(admittedly, I'm no expert), they're accessible only to the drive's
control logic.  I remember the same talk about extra drive capacity as
you, but as far as I know, no one actually got anything to work :)

To a limited extent, drive manufacturers have bin'd drives just like
CPU manufacturers do too...  making a 40Gb drive with an unacceptable
number of errors (or a single platter that's the cheapest manufactured
at the time) act like a 20Gb.  That's where the most hopeful talk was
of 'drive overclocking'...  but again...  no results that I've seen.

--tim