Okay, so basically I was looking at a hard drive with some dodgy corrupted software that I opened. I then proceeded to pop ou the hard drive, put a new one in. I was wondering if any data contained in the RAM, basically leftovers from when I used the corrupted version of that program might have survived in the RAM and could cause issues with my clean version of this program on the new hard drive? Sorry if this sounds weird or stupid but I'm a bit OCD and paranoid when it comes to data corruption...
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Does corrupted data live on in the RAM?
- Thread starter Mac Pro 2009
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RAM is volatile and temporary, it does not save data when the computer is powered off, in other words, corrupted data does not live on in RAM after it has been shut down.
So, there is 0% chance it could cause any issues then? Because I just watched this forensics show and they explained how they could sometimes extract data from RAM sticks because flash memory is not overwritten until it is used again and by freezing the sticks before pulling them out they could get some data off it? I shouldn't watch trashy late night TV I guess...
There's some truth in that... but you're extending the life of the data from seconds to maybe 10 minutes.
And you only have those few seconds to freeze the RAM before data is lost.
So if you shut off power to your computer for a minute, you're fine. The data is gone forever.