Wiping free space in Win XP...

[squirekat]

Hi again folks...

Does anyone know of a way to do a complete scrub (as in totally unrecoverable) the free space on your hard drives?

I have Norton System Works and in Win 98 there was a feature in "Wipe Info" where you could wipe the free space on your hard drives. In XP that feature is gone ::no: and you can only wipe existing files or folders. Other than the obvious solution of creating one giant folder and filling it with data, then wiping it clean, does anyone know of a way to wipe free space?

TIA...

Mark

[PostCode]

A few years ago I got into a conversation with a guy at Symantec. We were working on a problem with a Symantec product at the time but we kinda wandered about while we were waiting for something. Anyway, we got to talking about that particular program. The way I understand this is that it really dosen't work. According to him, it does wipe the data, but, it dosen't completely "wipe" it. Basically, it would take about 20-30 sessions of a wipe to complete for the data to be "securely" gone. The magnetic properties of the drive will always show uderlying data. No matter how many times a program like wipe is ran.

I can't actually says if this is all true, and if it is, how many times it would take to actually work. I've read a few things related to data recovery and how they can pick things up that were thought to be long gone though. I'll see if I can find anything on it and post back here if I do.

[mobokrasher]

AFAIK, there are no COTS that u can buy and use to completely "scrub" data from a storage media. I know that some Federal agencies do have propreitory tools that can do that. There are a couple of commercial businesses in my area that will do it for a fee; but the red tape and cost might not be worth it.

[squirekat]

Hi guys...

Thanks for the replies. It's interesting especially to get a response from a Symantec guy. In my original post I didn't want to get into the "regular" wipe and the "government" wipe, but now that I know you understand that I can mention it.

I wondered why the "wipe free space" option had been dropped in XP and now I have my answer (it doesn't really work). Luckily in my case it doesn't really matter, as I don't have anything really sensitive on my computer, but it's nice to know the details.

"Format" will have to be good enough for me and that's fine. I have a program called "Drive Image" that I swear by. It makes an image file of your entire C drive (or whatever you want). I just send that file out to my D or E drive and if I have a crash I just go back and retrieve the image file when everything was working. The great thing about this program is that it erases your whole C drive and starts from scratch when restoring the image file... so it even works for virus infections, like an extra safety net if something gets by Norton.

Thanks again for the replies. The knowledge pool here is a great resource.

Mark