Now why do you think secure erasers actually erase multiple times with random data.

Overwriting data with 0s is good enough for purposes of regular people, but places like the DoD use secure multiple wipes(7 i think).

Paranoid PGP-class people wipe times in the double digits.

Anyway, all the data on your hard rive is not stored as tight as it could be.
There are areas that are unused due to stability reasons.
Sometimes those areas are not along with the main area.

Of course, the regular hard drive will not see that, you will need to take out the platters and have some special tools.

Not to mention a ♥♥♥♥ clean room.

ftfy

Oph I wrote that because Venn seemed to believe that
he'd lose all his data if he formatted no matter what he did.

By temporary state, I meant that he could use the CDs to restore it.

Oh, I see. Just talking to you about formatting your stuff and all I thought you were thinking something weird. My bad brah.

i was having some problems on my xp computer that wouldnt go away. also i didnt want to reformat because of all of the stuff i had. so i spent 3 days defragging it 24 hours straight. and it did the trick amazingly so you may want to do that.