can your files in your hard drive be delete permanently without recovery?

Question

if so what program can help delete everything in hard drive.

Answer 1

McAfee may be your answer. I recently gave into it and bought it! They have a part of their program which is referred to as the "shredder". It deletes it so well that nothing can recover it, not even McAfee itself. It even deletes it in seperated parts to be sure. Other than that, you have no real choice but to delete it and then run a disk keeper scan or something as such.

Answer 2

To remove every trace of a file, use a tool such as Cipher.exe to permanently overwrite deleted data.

How To Use Cipher.exe to Overwrite Deleted Data in Windows

Administrators can use Cipher.exe to encrypt and decrypt data on drives that use the NTFS file system and to view the encryption status of files and folders from a command prompt. An updated version of the Cipher tool has been released for Windows 2000, and is included with Windows XP. The updated version adds another security option. This new option is the ability to overwrite data that you have deleted so that it cannot be recovered and accessed.

When you delete files or folders, the data is not initially removed from the hard disk. Instead, the space on the disk that was occupied by the deleted data is "deallocated." After it is deallocated, the space is available for use when new data is written to the disk. Until the space is overwritten, it is possible to recover the deleted data by using a low-level disk editor or data-recovery software.

If you create files in plain text and then encrypt them, Encrypting File System (EFS) makes a backup copy of the file so that, if an error occurs during the encryption process, the data is not lost. After the encryption is complete, the backup copy is deleted. As with other deleted files, the data is not completely removed until it has been overwritten. The new version of the Cipher utility is designed to prevent unauthorized recovery of such data.

For Windows 2000 users, the new Cipher.exe tool is part of Windows 2000 Security Rollup Package 1. For additional information, click the article number below to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:
311401 (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/311401/EN-US/) Windows 2000 Security Rollup Package 1 (SRP1), January 2002 The Cipher.exe utility that is included with Windows XP provides the ability to overwrite deleted data.

Source: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/315672

Answer 3

Technically the only way to completely erase a hard drive is to use a strong magnet on it or grind it up. However, the magnet required and a grinder that powerful are way to expensive for me. If you just want to erase the drive and reuse later you can use a program like GWScan to write zeros to the drive. This will make the data unaccessable to most people. If you are giving the drive away and are worried about someone finding the data, you can write over the drive multiple times. Good Luck

Answer 4

Yes. You can delete individual files securely. Eraser is a good tool to do that. Also, Microsoft has a command line utility.

You can securely delete a whole hard drive with DBAN, a free boot disk with a secure delete/formatting utility.

Answer 5

While it's technically still on your hard drive, the operating system shows it as free space as long as you've emptied your recycling bin of it. I'd recommend going to "Add remove programs" in the control panel and taking out any particularly large programs that you don't need.

Answer 6

Just delete it. Restoring is complicated to understand, so just think if I delete it, it now takes up no space on my hard drive.

Answer 7

If you are selling your computer, just buy a new hard drive for like $50. It is really simple to replace.

Answer 8

Go to the DOS command prompt from your control panel.
Type in "format C'
hit enter