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What happens when a user FORMATS a hard drive? Is my data really deleted?

April 26, 2017Data deleted formats happens user

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What happens when a user FORMATS a hard drive? Is my data really deleted?

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Contrary to what many users think, when a hard drive is formatted it may appear that the data has been deleted, in most cases it has not and remains hidden to the user. Computer forensic experts can recover this data with special forensic tools. Formatting a hard disk places the operating system Boot Record in the location specified in the partition table, clears out any FAT entries by changing the values to zero, and clears out the Root Directory (data area) by also changing the values to zero. The data area remains UNTOUCHED and IS NOT overwritten during formatting.