Erasing free space on HDDs

hill041 · 21 Feb 2011 at 01:25

Hi this is my first post so please go easy on me! I'm really looking forward to learning more and more.
I am just coming up to selling my old laptop and i am having trouble securely erasing my files. i have used east tec eraser, ccleaner, freeraser, R-Wipe&Clean and a few others even left it over night using the 35 wipe Gutmann setting!! but everytime i run my iCare Data Recovery Software bang! all my 'deleted' files reappear!
can anyone help? why doesnt the software clean my free disk space like it says it should? am i doing anything wrong? can anyone recommend some better software or techniques? i dont really want to wipe the whole drive as i'm unsure how to get it all working again after! i would rather sell a working laptop but want to be sure that some urchin cant get at my photos or bankdetails etc!! thanks d.

thunderflash · 21 Feb 2011 at 08:01

I use heidi eraser and never had any problems, although I use an older version a 5.x version (get it here) because it was a lot simpler than the 6.x versions and seemed to work better for me but maybe the newer version is better now, it was about a year ago since i tried v6 but you can get the 6.x versions here

hill041 · 21 Feb 2011 at 12:34

Thanks for the advice, I will try the v5 tonight. Did you run any restore software after to check your drive?

thunderflash · 21 Feb 2011 at 13:00

hill041 said:
Thanks for the advice, I will try the v5 tonight. Did you run any restore software after to check your drive?

I did try and recover video and photo files but they could not be found, so I assume nothing else would be found either.

xJcBx · 21 Feb 2011 at 13:02

Download Darik's Book and Nuke, burn the ISO to a CD, boot onto it and choose whichever mode you feel safest with. Auto works fine for me, but you might want to blitz it with a US DoD method.

Hope this helps!

tuomoy · 21 Feb 2011 at 13:17

I would also recommend Eraser although there are some issue with UAC and Windows 7 64-bit (you need to right click and run as administrator but make sure you exit the running task first).

hill041 · 21 Feb 2011 at 14:15

Yeah I'm on windows 7 64bit, could that be a problem?

JonJ678 · 21 Feb 2011 at 15:53

dban or dd will do this thoroughly, reformatting wont.

milkinc13 · 21 Feb 2011 at 16:48

xJcBx said:
Download Darik's Book and Nuke, burn the ISO to a CD, boot onto it and choose whichever mode you feel safest with. Auto works fine for me, but you might want to blitz it with a US DoD method.

Hope this helps!

2nd, always use this when needing to wipe a HDD