Windows Format Does Not Format The Drive At All.

I am using Recuva from my 1TB HDD.I have fully formatted the drive twice and stuff still is popping up.And most of the stuff is not even mine.

 

The quick formats might not do much in the way of getting rid of stuff.
I have read that writing all 0's to the drive is good step in really erasing the drive.
Any theories as to how there is data that is not yours?

 

This was not a quick format....I did a complete wipe.

I have no idea.None i bought this drive new at the time at best buy.But of course they could have re sold it as new.

 

Hmm.. people do buy and return things. But, from what I understand, the returns are usually sold as "open box" and you get a discount on the purchase. Perhaps Best Buy doesn't always do that or someone returned the item and it looked like it hadn't been opened but it actually had been opened.

In order to more effectively erase it, you could try downloading systemrescueCD. This is a Linux distro that runs off of a DVD or USB flash drive. Boot to the gui, and open a command window. From there, you can run badblocks on the drive. This writes data to the drive (simple patterns of characters). The real use of the program is to help in testing the drive. But, it would seem to work for your purpose, too. I can provide some better instructions, if plan to go down this road.

 

I usually delete all the partitions previously created on the drive, then rebuild the partition structure from the unallocated space.
This ensures everything is gone!

When installing Window 7/10 from your boot USB to a bare-bones HDD, windows will create its own required partition for system

 

I did that twice rolf.And some how stuff was still on there.

 

Formatting and changing partitions isn't going to remove all traces, it does a fine job of removing 'interference' like 'bleedthrough' from the older data. Tools like MBRWork are very likely to 'recover' the full drive content as it was prior to reformatting/repartitioning.

Doing a full overwrite is the only way to ensure the disk is 'clean', for forensically clean, you'll need to overwrite multiple times.

CCleaner wipe options as an example:

 

How many wipes does it take 3.Apparently two wipes does not cut it.

 

Depends on the type of wipe and the recovery software/method.

What did you wipe with?

 

The way things work is that when you format a drive or erase data, the operating system just marks the data as "available for later overwrite." It's more economical to mark a range of memory addresses as "irrelevant" instead of iterating through them and writing each bit to a 0 or a 1. I could be a bit off in my explanation but that's the general gyst of things.

btw, yeeeeh, Satrow post

 

In other words, if someone is using $0 - $50 software: not many
top of the field expert: a lot

 

MBRWork/TestDisk (the former is built in to the latter) do quite well for free, commercially, the best of the ~$70 software can also be very good but often much slower.

 

AtlBo has liked a lot of posts recently. I wonder if the account got compromised and it's a bot busy at work.

 

Maybe his screen's cracked and can't contribute more I'll get someone to check it out.

 

AtlBo has always come around on security and firewall issues and encouraging questions on partitioning and structure of windows and disk. A welcome member in my book!

 

Yep, good guy to have around!

 

DBAN.