Hard drive cleanup
 

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.

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

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!)

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

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.

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.

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

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