Which of the following methods should a technician perform to properly clear a hard drive before disposal?
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A. B. C. D.B.
To properly clear a hard drive before disposal, a technician should zero all block sectors. This process is also known as zero filling, low-level formatting or secure erasure. This process involves overwriting all the data on the hard drive with zeros.
Here's why:
When data is stored on a hard drive, it is stored in blocks or sectors. When a file is deleted, the data is not actually removed from the hard drive, but rather the space where the data was stored is marked as available for new data to be written over it. This means that until the space is overwritten with new data, the old data can still be recovered using data recovery software.
To prevent this from happening, a technician can use a zero filling tool or a disk wiping utility to overwrite all the blocks on the hard drive with zeros. This process will ensure that the data on the hard drive is completely erased and cannot be recovered.
Deleting the FAT or the partition, as suggested in answers A and C respectively, will not completely erase the data on the hard drive. These methods only remove the references to the data and not the data itself, which means the data can still be recovered using data recovery software.
Zeroing the NTFS journal, as suggested in answer D, is not an effective method to erase data on a hard drive. The NTFS journal is used to track changes made to files on an NTFS-formatted hard drive. Zeroing the journal would not erase the data on the hard drive, but only the information about the changes made to the files.
Therefore, the correct answer is B, zero all block sectors.