Quote from: AbraCadaver on April 21, 2012, 03:47 pmQuote from: mdmamail on April 21, 2012, 08:06 amLoad up a live CD too and blast the memory, though it should erase itself after an hour or so of no power (disconnect battery). +1It's technically possible (though hardly 100% reliable) to open up a computer and subject the RAM modules to very cold temperatures in order to help preserve whatever the contents were immediately before it was switched off. From there, the RAM modules can have their contents read.Don't allow this to frighten you too much though. You'd have to be a known, high value LE target for them to consider going to such lengths, and as mdmamail mentions, once the computer has been switched off for long enough, no RAM contents are retrievable no matter how much liquid nitrogen you useThanks AbraCadaver,This is the only documented method of bypassing Full Disk Encryption and is known as a "Cold Boot Attack" - if you replace a hard drive, there won't be anything left of that data that remained on the old one but you need to make sure the original has been securely erased. I think DBAN's Boot and Nuke has been mentioned before here. For ultra reliability use the Gutmann method which passes random data over the old information 35 times - Even our Secret Service here in the UK can't recover data from a hard drive wiped in this way but obviously your NSA in the USA have considerably more resources so either sell the old hard drive or dispose of it discretely - I dropped mine down a drain last time!V.