I bought a "refurbished" mini-HD from Geeks.com. I was curious whether by "refurbished" they meant it was factory refurbished, in which case the drive should have been clean, or just "used and returned to us," in which case there were probably a lot of deleted files still on the drive. I decided before trying autopsy/sleuth, I'd try magicrescue. I found about 840MB of data -- mostly mathematical graphs and such and some other files that support my theory that the previous owner was quite the nerd.

These are some of the images I recovered:

Here they are chilling in the living room. Quite a normal looking group.

...and now they're obviously nerds w/ a PowerPoint on "Earth-like planets" in the living room.

Of course I already knew the previous owner was a nerd given the hundreds of megabytes of stuff like this.

What's the moral of the story? Well, there are two:

1. When deleting files, especially before disposing/selling a device, wipe the drive from the first to the last sector with zeros and random data repeatedly.
   • If I cared, I'm sure I could dig through all the postscript/PDFs of papers the former owner was using and identify him/her.
2. When buying "refurbished" products, assume them to be nothing more than used products with nothing done to them by the vendor or factory before placing them back on the market.