COMMENT: writing a big file with zeros to overwrite old data or “ZERO FILL” as its called is a good way to erase data from those that don’t know how to recover things. in other words it doesn’t do anything to help protect you from theft of data should someone that wants your data actually get their hands on your drive. the only way to safely erase data is to use a program that supports different wipe standards like DOD, gutman, etc.

what i suggest for if you really have something to hide is use Active@Kill Disk. it has single pass up to over 30 pass zero fill and random data, and custom mode where you tell it how many passes you want. remember that high security takes time so don’t expect it to be done in a few minutes.

- somalia

This three pass wipe probably prevents most data recovery and no additional programs are required.

Cipher.exe Command-line Utility

The Cipher.exe command-line utility may be used to overwrite deallocated file clusters on the NTFS disk to reduce the risk of discovery of plaintext shreds left over from file conversion. Cipher.exe /W makes three disk write passes on all unused clusters on the disk. The first pass writes 0. The second pass writes 0xF. The third pass writes pseudorandom data.

CIPHER /W:directory
/W
Removes data from available unused disk space on the entire volume. If this
option is chosen, all other options are ignored. The directory specified can be
anywhere in a local volume. If it is a mount point, or points to a directory in
another volume, the data on that volume will be removed.
Note Cipher.exe wipes all deallocated files from the specified disk even if a specific folder is named. It may not be possible to wipe files smaller than 4K in size as they may exist in the Master File Table (MFT) and not in separate clusters on the disk.

To run Cipher.exe

Log on as an administrator of the local machine.

Close all applications.

Open a command prompt by selecting Start, then Run, and entering CMD as the command.

Type “Cipher /W:” (without the quotes), where is any directory on the drive you want to clean. For instance, “Cipher /W:c:\ ” will cause the deallocated space on the C: drive to be overwritten.

Cipher.exe will begin running, and will display a message when it’s completed.

Important Cipher.exe /W may take a very long time to run, especially on large volumes. It is not possible to stop it once it has started. Running the chkdsk.exe command on the volume after completion is a best practice. Also, it is not recommended that the cipher.exe /W be run multiple times; the intent of the process is a one time cleanup of the disk. Note NTFS drives can be mounted as directories. For instance, a drive could be mounted as C:\folder1\D_Drive. This usage enables drives of this type to be cleaned.

The new cipher tool is also available for Windows 2000 by downloading from the Microsoft Web site: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;298009&sd=tech

http://www.heidi.ie/eraser/

Everyone knows that. Why settle for all the other crap?

Download the software from here…
http://www.stellarinfo.com/file-eraser.htm

You can use the complete feature for 30 days

Enjoy this wonderful software….