If you've been using computers for a decent amount of time there is a good chance someone has told you that data stored on a hard drive is not exactly safe. I'm here to assure you that this is indeed true.

No, the real threat to hard drives are the people that use them, by which I mean you and me. Hard drives, being the dynamic storage devices that they are, are extremely easy to erase in any number of amusing and simple to achieve ways... as are USB hard drives and flash memory cards (recovery tips for that media is detailed here). Also recently added; How to fix a 1TB hard drive that suddenly changes to 0.0GB, or 32MB in size.

Working as a computer tech during the glory days of Windows XP, you get rather used to using FDISK and other hard drive utilities to prepare and repair customer's drives, which leads to a certain over confidence. That attitude can lead straight to disaster, sort of like giving a 12 year old boy the keys to an ATV.

Picture this if you will; there I was, two or three sentences and a screen shot away from finishing a 5000+ word article on computer upgrades. All I had to do was fire up FDISK on a dual boot Windows PC system and grab a few screen shots. I figured I'd write a little blurb on how to partition a drive, making sure to tell the readers not to mess with FDISK if they were not sure what they were doing…

Yes, there's going to be some irony here.

So anyway, I wanted to get some more screen shots of the actual partitioning screen, but I did not have a blank hard drive handy. I figured I could use my NTFS formatted XP drive (which FDISK perceived as a blank drive) to start the "process," grab the screen shots and then cancel the partitioning.

No problem. Except for one little thing…

I had forgotten that FDISK, in the process of checking the disk before it prompts you for the size of the partition, writes information to certain areas of the hard drive. This data writes over whatever might have been there before. Meanwhile, there I was, watching the '%complete' counter and wondering why a little red warning flag kept going off in my brain? I restarted WinXP and waited for it to boot, and waited... and waited... Oops.