wipe files complately?

[Dissolved]

i saw on tech tv, that they saw data can be taken off a hdd even after 7 wipes (they said the pentagon wipes 7 times for there data), i was wondering if theres any proven ways to totaly delete a file?

[Jeff Bolton]

hard drive+sledgehammer= safe and thorough destruction of sensitive files. :)

on the real= i'm sure that after many wipes, small fragments of files still remain, but not enough to make a difference. but as far as TOTAL deletion goes, who can say?

jeff

[Christoph]

Do you really need that level of protection? If so all I can say is that I want some of that excitement.
Here (http://www.jetico.com/download.htm)'s a link to a BC Wipe download site, which is probably the program you were referring to. If you need more than 7 passes, just set it for 100 passes or something.

[Dissolved]

well i was just curious.. never hurts to learn something new..

[jbell]

when you earse info... it only erases the header info on the outside edge of the disk - kinda liek a street map it tells the comp what path to take to get to girlfriend.exe version 1.3..... you can write to a disk and never rewrite the space that file lays on - thus why it is recoverable by bypassing the need for the header ( which I do not know how they do it) you can still obtain that info - best way to delete? flood your hd with useless files that will force the drive to be written to untill it is full... that rewrites the entire surface - destroying any previous data... then just wipe that info and it is gone!

[Christoph]

What BC Wipe does is blow up the apartment where Girlfriend 1.3 lives in addition to destroying the map, going by jbell's analogy. Sometimes she'll get out in time, and sometimes they'll be able to find her body. It writes useless data over the original data. I think that the best way to kill any given file would be to use something like BC Wipe then defrag your HD.
Sorry for the grim analogy. It's getting kind late.

[Teacher_Doug]

or you can write your own program in C++ to write a random binary over the complete disc.

[diehrd]

DO a low level format .That writes zeros to the entire disk.

Or put big magnets on the drive,That should make it unreadable,Unusable,and a great paper weight.{Not a good idea if you wanted to use it later on}

[turd]

here i use this, its free, also will address some of your question

http://www.tolvanen.com/eraser/