Vista Security Center: Fuck off.

[bluestarultor]

Originally Posted by synkr0nized

Right.

To format a drive, you are resetting all of the sectors on the disk's platters. In some instances, you're just erasing the master boot record and partition tables while technically leaving the data, or more precisely the 1s and 0s set in the platters, in a recoverable state. More often, however, the entire drive is zero'd out, effectively making the drive the same as when it was first made.

In either case, the OS is toast unless you have the right tools to recover the drive/rebuild the MBR and relevant tables in the former case.

More often? When did this suddenly happen? When you format a drive, all it does is go and mark all writable sectors as free. Unless you specifically shred it or something, the data stays put until overwritten and can be recovered. It's just faster and easier that way.