Good CF-29 story - one more reason to replace OEM HD

OK - I bought 4 CF-29 MK1's from same seller about a year ago. Kept one for myself and sold the rest. I sold two of then intact with the 40 Gig OEM Hard Drives as they purchaser did not want to upgrade the HD. Both were set up DUAL boot XP/Ubuntu and had no issues at fresh install of both OS's. Ran onto a purchaser recently and he told me the following story:
- Was having issues getting windows to hook up to his Wireless Wifi and gave his TB to a "freind" of his that is a retired spook CIA/NSA type high speed kinda guy, said he found that it was not connecting because their was some kind of theft software on the HD that was pinging back to a PA Nat'l Guard unit ! he dug into the HD and found a complete hidden partition that was encrypted that still had a bunch of files on it.

Best part of this and the caution I can advise is that I did a full DEBAN wipe of this drive and did not see the obviously hidden partion when I reloaded the OS's. Even with the wipe and a fresh install it was still able to activate the tracking program. Kinda funny but scary all at the same time

Later

 

It seems unlikely but anything is possible I suppose. You'd think that a "non-dos" partition would show up somewhere with fdisk or gparted before you formatted it though.

 

Best bet is always to start with a brand new drive when doing a fresh OS install, and later on look at moving files from an old drive to the new one. That way you're ensured a 'clean' installation platform unless the install media is compromised.

Craig.

 

I VERY rarely reuse the stock hard drive... I have a stack of 20, 40 and 60GB hard drives. I do reuse some of the 80GBs if they check out though.

Interesting story.