Sweep Hard Drive without Reloading?

[SThompson86]

Hello, I was messing around with a recovery tool tonight with my hard drive, and I found alot of stuff that I guess is just taking up space on the drive. What I am wondering is, is there a way to clean this stuff up like DBAN does, but without completely reloading? There may not be a way. I have done some searching, and have not found any info on what I am trying to do.

Thanks in advanced.

 

[KSoD]

You got it all wrong. That stuff is not taking up space. Using a recovery tool will recover it after it has been deleted. But that space is marked free by the OS so you can still use it. So yeah a recover tool will show that it is there but by no means is it taking up space anymore.

If you recovered all those files you would see that you have even less space than what is reported now. You need to get a shredder or eraser program if you want to delete the data and not have it stay.

WARNING using a program like this will completely remove it from your system. There will never be a chance for recovery at all and it takes LONGER than a normal delete.

 

[joelm3103]

Yeah what Mak said above ^. I once thought of this too , same exact thing lol.
http://www.techist.com/forums/f9/quick-data-recovery-deletion-question-226394/

 

[Apokalipse]

I think he's asking how he can overwrite the deleted data to destroy it completely.