[coon2000]

erased? surely you jest, it’s there Even if it was "erased" any IT specialist can tell you that its still there and available. The most transparent administration. You can see right through it.

If every single sector on the drive gets forcibly written over, then data will be gone from that disk.

[MV=PY]

"If every single sector on the drive gets forcibly written over, then data will be gone from that disk"

That is incorrect, at least for magnetic media. Companies like this recover overwritten data from magnetic disks all day every day.

[kevkrom]

If every single sector on the drive gets forcibly written over, then data will be gone from that disk.

Negative. It still leaves a magnetic resonance than can be detected. Military standard (at leafs from 20 years ago, when I knew the current standards) require every sector of the disk to be overwritten three times, using three different data patterns. Even then I bet it's not a complete wipe but just "good enough" for operational purposes. The only true way to make a drive unrecoverable is to physically destroy it.