Eraser for cleaning empty disc space

[AgeGap]

Does anyone know how to make sure that the blank space on C drives can be cleaned. I have heard stories of second hand computers with personnal info on being sold even though the previous owner thought he had wiped the drive.

[Broes]

http://www.filedudes.com/Active_Kill_Disk___Hard_Drive_Eraser-download-24954.html

[MortFurd]

The surest way to be sure you deleted everything would be to get Damn Small Linux. Burn the 50MB CD image to CD. Boot from the DSL CD, open an Xterm and use dd to copy zeros to the drive.

There's a tool that comes with XP that does the same job. For the life of me I can't remember its name, though I saw an article about just this very thing a couple of days ago. At any rate, you can't use it on the drive you booted from. You'd have to boot from something else (I don't recall if you can run it from the XP install CD) or install the drive in a second PC and wipe it there.

I'll look again when I get home tonight. The article is in a magazine I subscribe to.

[_Q_]

Darik's Boot and Nuke (http://dban.sourceforge.net/)

[MortFurd]

The surest way to be sure you deleted everything would be to get Damn Small Linux. Burn the 50MB CD image to CD. Boot from the DSL CD, open an Xterm and use dd to copy zeros to the drive.

There's a tool that comes with XP that does the same job. For the life of me I can't remember its name, though I saw an article about just this very thing a couple of days ago. At any rate, you can't use it on the drive you booted from. You'd have to boot from something else (I don't recall if you can run it from the XP install CD) or install the drive in a second PC and wipe it there.

I'll look again when I get home tonight. The article is in a magazine I subscribe to.
I remembered wrong. It's the Vista boot CD that you can do this from. The program is called DISKPART.

[Soapy Sam]

The obvious way in windows is to erase everything but the OS, defrag the drive, then reformat the drive and reinstall windows.

I've heard stories about improbable data recovery too, but I think they're bunk. And unless you have missile launch codes on there, who is going to take the trouble to check?

[Malamule]

Put the drive as a 2nd device in a working system and use "Sure Delete" or any of the myriad of disk blanking tools. Sure Delete will also clear and overwrite any blank space on a working partition.

[ShowerComic]

Eraser (Now up to v. 5.84) http://www.heidi.ie/eraser/ has 5 built in wipe methods with increasing 'confidence.' The methods include the standard DOD wipes (3 pass, and 7 pass) and a Gutmann algorithm (35 pass).

For an interesting paper on the Gutmann algorithm, by it's inventor see:

http://www.usenix.org/publications/library/proceedings/sec96/full_papers/gutmann/