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CompTIA A+ Certification All-in-One Exam Guide

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EXAM TIP Professional hard drive disposal services will guarantee they

have truly, thoroughly destroyed drives by issuing a certificate of destruction.

This certificate brings peace of mind, among other things, that precious data

won’t slip into unwanted hands.

Sanitizing your drive means the hard drive will still function once the data

has been destroyed. There are several more or less effective ways to do this.

The CompTIA A+ exams want you to know the difference between a

standard format and a low-level format. You already learned about standard

formatting back in Chapter 9, so how is low-level formatting different? With

older drives (pre-1990s), low-level formatting would create the physical

marks on the disk surface so that the drive knew where to store data; in the

process, it erased the data from the drive. This was initially done at the

factory, but utilities existed to repeat this operation later. As drives became

more complex, hard drive manufacturers disabled the ability to perform lowlevel

formats outside the factory.

Today, the term “low-level formatting” is often used to describe a zero-fill

or overwrite operation. This process returns the drive to a state as close to

like-new as possible by writing zeros to every location on the drive.

You can also use a drive wiping utility to erase any old, deleted data that

hasn’t been overwritten yet. Simply put, this overwrites the free space on

your drive with junk data that makes the original data harder to recover.

Piriform’s CCleaner is a data-sanitizing utility that can erase your Web

browsing history, erase your recent activity in Windows (such as what

programs you ran), and even scrub your hard drive’s free space to make

deleted files unrecoverable (see Figure 11-31).

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