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I have some images on my drive that are persisting after an operating system install and multiple high strength drive wipes. Programs like Cipher and CCleaner aren't effective. The partition is small and I've filled it up with images in an attempt to overwrite the old ones, but the new ones instead of the deleted ones are wiped by a format/reinstall of Windows 7.

karel
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David
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    This question is a bit unclear. Your title suggests methods of freeing space on your HDD while the body seems to discuss secure data removal. Which area are you looking at here? – Matthew Williams Mar 27 '14 at 18:02
  • What programs are you using specifically? – Ramhound Mar 27 '14 at 18:04
  • yes sorry but rules didn't except what I put so I went with that I want to wipe free space – David Mar 27 '14 at 18:21
  • [DBAN](http://www.dban.org/) it before installing fresh OS. This will destroy everything. Deleted files could also be wiped out without special tools by simply writing/copying garbage files until disk is full, file sizes should be multiples of filesystem cluster size. Then just delete those garbage files and you're done (not best method but most of time just enough to remove traces of removed files). – Sampo Sarrala - codidact.org Mar 27 '14 at 18:23
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    Also, have you checked if those photos are really coming from some auto-generated thumbnail files/folders. Might be that actual files are deleted but not files generated by some programs, and when you run free space cleanup of course it will not overwrite files that has not been marked as free space. – Sampo Sarrala - codidact.org Mar 27 '14 at 18:34
  • now that might be a reason thanks u mean like picasa that would make sence so how do I check if these thumbnails exist????. Also what bothers me is cashed images that internet explorer store on my pc when I visit a site unwanted adds mostly sexually get dumped on my pc nd I assume then deleted to my free space, ?? is that what happens. – David Mar 27 '14 at 21:32

4 Answers4

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Give CCleaner another try. Under advanced, check off "Wipe free space". This will write over all the free space on your drive with zeroes, which should accomplish what you're trying to do. It will take quite a long time, but should get the job done.

TorpedoBench
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  • You can also do this to wipe specific areas of the drive as well, saving you from having to do a full wipe/reinstall on the system – Stese Apr 13 '17 at 14:24
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Securely deleting files gets quite difficult with modern filesystems, since they don't do dumb block allocation like FAT32. Instead, rather sophisticated allocation strategies are used, which has the effect that overwriting an existing file doesn't necessarily mean that you're overwriting the old allocated block, but eventually complete others.

If you really want to keep your files safe from unauthorized access even after removal, you should consider encrypting your hard disk. There are good and secure programs for this out there, even free (as in freedom) ones, e.g. TrueCrypt.

Matthew Williams
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Andreas Wiese
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The Windows built-in Disk Cleanup utility can clear out a surprising amount of space, especially if you go to the "More Options" tab and select "Clean up..." under "System Restore and Shadow Copies".

Eric Dand
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Use a utility to write the drive with a pattern regardless of anything. That is write the drive with all 0's, or all 1's, or 01010101, etc. You would need to boot from USB, CD, or other disk to do this unless you know the physical location of the files and could partition around the files and write the pattern to the partition only.

Damon
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