[ New CPR Toolbox Utility Goes Where No Data Purging Technology Has Gone Before ]
gRase Erases Hard Drive Data on "G-Listed" Bad Sectors
For data security professionals, electronic data locked up in hard drive "G-Lists" has represented a special challenge.
In the world of hard drive technology, the G-List is something like a witness protection program. Hiding in plain site on the disk platter, the G-list is a sector relocation table used by the HDD's error tracking system. When the HDD system identifies a sector that has gone bad, it stores the address of the defective sector in the G-List and substitutes a clean new sector from the "spare sector" area. This remapping protocol assures that good data isn't written to bad sectors.
Although this solution allows the hard drive to continue functioning seamlessly, it also presents a challenge for data erasure technologies. Because the hard drive can no longer access defective sectors, data erasure technologies can't either. Up until now, the data on the defective sectors has remained on the HDD even after purging by software overwrite or even Secure Erase-enabled firmware devices.
Even though the drive owner believes all data has been purged, it can in fact be retrieved by sophisticated forensic data recovery methods. However, CPR Tools, one of the nation's preeminent data recovery and destruction organizations, has introduced a new data destruction utility that can access and destroy data on G-List defective sectors. CPR Toolbox and the gRase utility are included free with the company's Hammer and SCSI Hammer hard drive data erasure devices.
The gRase feature provides additional assurance that IT Security Managers are now able to establish end-of-life best practices policies that comply with mandatory privacy regulations such as HIPPA, GLBA and Sarbanes Oxley.
The Hammer Erases ATA hard drives securely, allows re-use.
