Need a good program to overwrite just free space on disk

[SoulAssassin]

As the title says I'm turning in my old laptop to work and for whatever reason corporate policy is we're not allowed to gdisk/wipe the hard drive before we turn it in. I'm wondering if there's another program that does basically the same thing but leaves the data that's there intact. I've already defragged since that should overwrite some of the files.

Before anyone starts assuming stuff, I never had anything crazy on here that I really need to hide. Did my taxes on it and had some personal pictures (not that kind, I'm talking Christmas with the family) I would prefer the nosy admins didn't get there hands on.

 

[IHateMyJob2004]

You have problems if you never put non-work-safe things on it. You are paranoid o soemthign that people are goign to see pictures of your family?

 

[mechBgon]

Given that it's family pics and your taxes... ok. Start > Run > cmd and click OK.

cipher /w:C:\

This overwrites just the free space with three layers of EFS-encrypted junk data, then deletes it all. Budget some time for it, it takes about 1 minute per GB on a 15000rpm SCSI drive, per pass. Do you think they're really going to bust out a data-recovery app and try to recover stuff, though? 😕

 

[SoulAssassin]

Originally posted by: mechBgon
Given that it's family pics and your taxes... ok. Start > Run > cmd and click OK.

cipher /w:C:\

This overwrites just the free space with three layers of EFS-encrypted junk data, then deletes it all. Budget some time for it, it takes about 1 minute per GB on a 15000rpm SCSI drive, per pass. Do you think they're really going to bust out a data-recovery app and try to recover stuff, though? 😕

If I was the admin and I had a bunch of free time, I might do it. Hell, back in the day I used to search people's home drives for fun stuff. There's a little bit of paranoia involved, no doubt, but it's basically just a precautionary measure.

cipher is running...thx.

 

[SoulAssassin]

Originally posted by: IHateMyJob2004
You have problems if you never put non-work-safe things on it. You are paranoid o soemthign that people are goign to see pictures of your family?

It's also (password protected) excel docs with credit card balances, stored passwords in FF and such. As a traveling consultant if I told my boss I had gigs and gigs of pr0n on my laptop he wouldn't have cared so it's nothing like that. Just trying to clean house before it goes back.