Hi guys and gals, I want to use the D-ban program to nuke part of my hard drive. I have a few questions. My situation is this. In the past I have 'possibly' illegally d/l copious amounts of music, movies, porn ect... from lime-wire and other programs. Since then I have deleted it from the shared folders and pasted onto the other partition on my hard-drive for library keeping and then deleted the shared folders. My thinking is this. They can't prove I didn't acquire those files by legal means and since they are all just mp3s and avi's or whatever they should be safe if they are just there or am i wrong?

First: I have all this data on one partition that is just music and movies ect... I don't want to reinstall these if possible cause its like 90 gigs so using this program can I choose to nuke just the partition that windows and programs are on (i.e. limewire and my shared folders ect... and history)? And if so how complete a nuke would this be? Would the other partition which is just media files and never had a program or anything else on it still be vulnerable to incriminating forensic analysis? I guess what I'm saying is does a partition effectively make two separate entities, in which I can clean one and be at ease? Because if alot of what I d/l was maybe pirated media and erasing all the d/l info programs and history ect... from the one partition would erase evidence no?

Also, If I backed up my partition with windows and programs on a blank hard-drive, nuked the partition, and then restored it with the copy on the back-up hard-drive would that just replace the information and stuff I was trying to remove. If so is there a way to selectively back up and nuke so that I don't have to reinstall 50 things in my program file and even windows itself, but still rest at ease knowing that the computers history is fresh at least in the eyes of any potential law in-queries?

Just having them is not illegal anyway, no matter how you got them.

Downloading is not going to get you in trouble anyway.
What you have to control or prevent is the uploading of files
from you. If you're not doing that, you have nothing to
worry about because not even the record companies would
sue you if you're not uploading a lot of music.


Most backup software doesn't bother to save the contents of
empty sectors or even the slack space in clusters at the end
of each file so yes, that would be safe. Still, it would be far
faster to use a secure wipe program to just clean up all the
empty and slack space without the long backup and restore.

Some backup software can be made to save a complete
image of a disk, empty sectors and all, so you wouldn't
want to use that feature if you wanted to be rid of old
deleted data.

nope...AFAIK dban is for totally wiping a drive, not individual partitions...

your course of action is up to you...at this moment in time the powers of the RIAA/MPAA are waning and the forced forensic analysis of your drive might not happen (it HAS happened to others)...free space wipers and such might do the trick for you....of course the ultimate 'trick' is to throw away the HDD and replace it...

AW's comments in this thread indicate he has never heard the the Candyman Project which was conducted a few years back....the Law was supplying illegal images to ensnare people...apparently totally legal as plenty of people are paying the price for accepting those emails and such (including some law officers...big surprise eh?)....just remember, AW is from Canada and they have different laws than the rest of the planet....

and think of this: if you had spent the time to start a case against an individual, wouldn't you go 'all the way' once you had done a fair amount of work????? admit it, sure you would!

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So Long and Thanks for All the Files
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