Erasing Free Space on a Hard Disk XP / Vista / Windows 7 and 8
It should be no surprise that when you delete a file in windows, it does not select the actual file, but just the pointer to it. This means if you simply format or wipe the contents of a drive before selling, it's trivial to recover the data on there.
Whilst there are tools on the Internet to securely wipe date, there is within most versions of Windows is the ability to wipe drive space free of charge.
Simply launch a command prompt and type cipher /w:x where x is the letter of the drive you wish to erase, in the example below the drive is letter G.
Depending on the size of the drive it can take some time.
Whilst there are tools on the Internet to securely wipe date, there is within most versions of Windows is the ability to wipe drive space free of charge.
Simply launch a command prompt and type cipher /w:x where x is the letter of the drive you wish to erase, in the example below the drive is letter G.
Depending on the size of the drive it can take some time.
