overwriting old harddrive space

[bushwakk3r]

i read somewhere you can overwrite your unused harddrive space with garbage to make it unreadable,can anyone help me with the programme please, so no one can read all your old harddrive entries that are deleted supposedly but not reallt apparently thanks.the one i read about does it * times over.

[Moonbat]

There's a method called the Guttman Method that does it *5 times over, and is one of the securist methods to use.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guttman_method

I don't know much about using this method though.

[Ezekiel]

i read somewhere you can overwrite your unused harddrive space with garbage to make it unreadable,can anyone help me with the programme please, so no one can read all your old harddrive entries that are deleted supposedly but not reallt apparently thanks.the one i read about does it * times over.

When you 'delete' a file, references to it in the file system are removed but the actual data still remains on the hard disk, allowing easy recovery by even amateur computer users. This much you probably know.

There are two ways to securely delete data:

*. When deleting files, use a 'secure delete' utility to overwrite the file then delete it.

2. Use a disk-overwriting tool to perform multiple writes of random data to your whole hard drive. This takes a long time.

Unfortunately for you, I did not include any method of only overwriting 'unused' disk space. This is because as far as I know there is no way to do this -- you can either overwrite files at the time of deletion or you can wipe the whole disk; you can't wipe files that you have already deleted (well, at least not easily).

The second option (wiping the whole disk) can not be done while the disk is in-use (if it's the partition you booted from or if you're accessing it). If you have one hard drive with one partition running Windows, you would need to boot into something like a Linux live CD and perform this task from there (possibly with the shred command). Alternatively you could plug the hard drive into another computer.

[nozf3r4tu]

Besides all the info provided above,there are plenty programs available that will "erase" anything from a pc.Google it,your should come up with something usefu.

[bushwakk3r]

so i should have done it as i went along then,maybe i can find out how fromm now on ,i will take a look at that wiki entry,thanks for answering guys,i thought this forum looked a bit dead and spammed but obviously not, great.

[bushwakk3r]

bit too muchof novice for gutman method methinks:)