Reformatting Question

[Max_Payne]

Hi guys and gals, juss a quick question.

A week ago somebody hacked into my hotmail account and took alot of personal information. I have always had really good virus/firewall protection.. but i guess not even then are we all prtotected. Many of folders were accessed etc.. quit annoying. I do not wanna take any chances.. i am going to reformat my harddrive and start new. One question.. if i reformat is their any chance of previous data being recovered off of it again?

Any answers would be great... thnxs

Mike:x

 

[Dr. Freeman]

well...to answer ur question, it really depends on the hacker.
is it possible to retieve previous data? yes but the hacker would have to really know alot about partitions/hard drives to pull this off.

maybe someone with more knowledge about this can go deeper into discussing this with u but yeah, its possible to retrieve data after a hard drive has been formatted.

 

[furiousV]

What you want to do is zero-fill your hard drive. If you are really paranoid, there are programs out there that write 'rubbish' and random numbers to your hard drive, and format (zero-fill) and do that a few times, making it very difficult to retreive any data.

The only way to really ensure no data is recoverable is to destroy your hard drive.

This program might interest you Boot and Nuke

Also look at your hard drive manufacturers website, they usually have diagnostics utilities that you burn to your CD and boot from, and they have a zero-fill option. If it is a Maxtor, then you are looking for PowerMax

 

[gweedodogg69]

Actually you don't have to know that much about hard drive at all except the fact that when you "delete" something in Windows, it isn't really gone until that part of the drive is overwritten hence why programs such as GetDataBack FAT32/NTFS can retrieve files and such. And isn't hotmail online? If you were using Outlook Express or Outlook or some other mail client to get your e-mail from hotmail I'd understand, but if you were just checking your e-mail online then I don't see how a hacker could get into your machine.