How to ensure no data trail

mechBgon

Super Moderator<br>Elite Member
Oct 31, 1999
30,699
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The best way is to remove the hard drive and physically destroy it.

The next-best way is to run DBAN on it a few times.

If neither of those are options, you could empty the Recycle Bin and then run the command cipher /w:C:\ to overwrite all "blank" area on the HDD with three layers of EFS-encrypted junk data, possibly a couple runs. This can take a while. On a fast HDD, it's about 1 minute per GB.

The cipher command is not available on WinXP Home Edition, btw.
 

kingtas

Senior member
Aug 26, 2006
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I think Macafee had a utility that will run zeros over deleted files to gov specs.

EDIT: Just reading that defraging after deleting files isn't a good way of overwriting these files.
 

Pwnbroker

Senior member
Feb 9, 2007
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Western Digital has a utlity to do a "government wipe" of hard drives, and I would assume any other hard drive manufacturer would too.