16th February 2006, 8:07 PM
The "shell of the OS"? By the way, read the whole thing on what I said. I DO in fact know of what I speak, because I deal with this stuff all the time.
I mean, I frickin' SAID everything you just said. I was correcting YOU with that information!
I directly stated that when you delete a file in such a way as to avoid the recycle bin, you are basically just removing it's location data from the file allocation table. The OS just reads from this table, but the table isn't actually a part of the OS. That's why you can install another OS and it can still read those files. And I went into extreme detail onto how the file is only really unrecoverable, by normal means, when it is overwritten, however a file can actually be overwritten a few times and the original data will still be there. Ignore the clusters for a second (which is accurate, to a point) and remember the physical process going on. I've actually recovered lost partitions even when a new one has been created and files written to it, because there is a faint bit of magnetism there that can be detected if the HD is capable of picking it up and set in the right mode to look for that.
To get rid of that faint bit, you rewrite over and over again to that sector until that faint trace is eliminated. There are special programs that can do this repeated rewriting.
I mean, I frickin' SAID everything you just said. I was correcting YOU with that information!
I directly stated that when you delete a file in such a way as to avoid the recycle bin, you are basically just removing it's location data from the file allocation table. The OS just reads from this table, but the table isn't actually a part of the OS. That's why you can install another OS and it can still read those files. And I went into extreme detail onto how the file is only really unrecoverable, by normal means, when it is overwritten, however a file can actually be overwritten a few times and the original data will still be there. Ignore the clusters for a second (which is accurate, to a point) and remember the physical process going on. I've actually recovered lost partitions even when a new one has been created and files written to it, because there is a faint bit of magnetism there that can be detected if the HD is capable of picking it up and set in the right mode to look for that.
To get rid of that faint bit, you rewrite over and over again to that sector until that faint trace is eliminated. There are special programs that can do this repeated rewriting.
"On two occasions, I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question." ~ Charles Babbage (1791-1871)