Hard drive cleanup

[Tone]

I'm about to donate an old PC to a friend and wonder if anyone could recommend a free file shredder which could prevent any old deleted stuff being recovered? Just out of interest I ran Recuva and am somewhat amazed by what was still there.

[Saab Dastard]

Best thing to do is to physically remove and replace the hard disk with a new one, then hit the original with a hammer.

Next best thing to do is to use a freeware program such as Darik's Boot and Nuke to securely overwrite the entire disk, then re-format and re-install the OS. That will be sufficient to prevent the average user from finding anything, but might not prevent a serious forensic search from recovering files.

Not recommended would be to just "erase" certain files, leaving the OS and applications intact.

SD

[Tone]

Thanks for the information. It looks like both DBAN and Copywipe completely wipe all data on the drive. What I really want to do is to leave the OS and applications in place and just wipe the data that XP has 'deleted' (Hah!)

[frostbite]

Never tried it, but Power Desk (my favourite file manager) has a Destroy option next to Delete.

[Tarq57]

I use Eraser.
Don't know what the current version is like, but the 5.82 version I'm using works very well. Erase single files folders, free space, or create a nuke disk.

[dazdaz]

Although it's not free, I use McAfee Shredder. There are options to overwrite (free space) i.e. deleted files on XP. It also re-writes (if selected) seven times over a file. Which is to the USA Government standard for file deleting security.

[Saab Dastard]

The reason I don't recommend shredding individual files or folders is not that I don't trust the efficacy of such shredders - and they have their place.

It's just that if you are moving on a PC, you are by no means guaranteed to manually find all the places where sensitive information has been copied to and cached / stored temporarily. Something is bound to be overlooked.

That's why I advocate a complete disk wipe (or replacement).

SD

[Tone]

Thanks for all the input. I tried Eraser and it seems to work fine, thanks to Tarq57 for that suggestion. I do understand that the only real way to get sure and certain deletion is the hammer method.
Tone