Windows cipher

[Sheninat0r]

I was messing around the other day and decided to get a file-recovery program to see what kind of stuff was left on my hard drive. I ended up with about ~20,000 files in 2GB free space that came from an old Half-Life install and an Oblivion install, most with "excellent" recoverability.

So then I thought, "dang, how could I get rid of these?" and started googling stuff. I came upon the "cipher" command, which is used to encrypt folders/drives and stuff by Windows, but also comes with a command [cipher /W] that is supposed to write over all the free space on your drive, in three passes - first with all zeroes, then all ones, and then random zeroes and ones.

After doing a cipher /W on both my drives, I did the scan for deleted files again, and nothing had changed. Obviously that shouldn't be right, so now I come to you to ask: what's the deal with the cipher command? It SHOULD have destroyed all the leftover data on my drives, but no - it's all still there. Getting rid of these files is NOT first priority for me, I'm mostly interested in more about the cipher command, so don't recommend me programs to erase my free space.

Good question.
Bumping this into the OS forum, as it fits a bit better there.

n7
Memory/Storage/Vid Mod

 

[Nothinman]

My first guess is that it overwrote the freespace but not the deleted MFT entries so you can still find the delete filenames until their entries get reused but the data itself is effectively gone.