Secure erase question/help?

[MythicFrost]

Hi,

I've got an iMac selling very soon and the secure erase is 2/3 complete and I might have to cancel it and I'm wondering if that'll have gotten rid of all my data?

I had two partitions: 1400GB (OS X) / 600GB (Win 7). About 250GB on Win7 and 150GB on OS X. Is the data ordered or scattered all over the disk? I'm hoping 2/3 complete (writing zero's) will have removed all my data.

Any idea? Thanks, I need a quick reply if possible.

 

[Tumbleweed666]

Hi,

I've got an iMac selling very soon and the secure erase is 2/3 complete and I might have to cancel it and I'm wondering if that'll have gotten rid of all my data?

No one can possibly know, but if you are doing the 7x or 35x overwrite dont bother, a single pass with zeros or random data will be sufficient and far faster. If you are only writing zeroes once and its only done 2/3 well of course its always possible there is some of your data left.

 

[MythicFrost]

No one can possibly know, but if you are doing the 7x or 35x overwrite dont bother, a single pass with zeros or random data will be sufficient and far faster. If you are only writing zeroes once and its only done 2/3 well of course its always possible there is some of your data left.

All right, thanks. I did a single pass. I was hoping that the data might be stored at the front of the drive, if that makes sense, and since I had so little data (300GB) it'll have erased that part really early on. Just to explain what I was hoping would be the case, although I kind of know the data is scattered all over the disk, anyway.

Thanks again.

 

[Tumbleweed666]

OK, so odds are all your the data was stored at the front, but if you've had it a while, added and removed partitions, put some big files in then removed them, etc its always possible there will be something there.