Cipher - Invalid Drive Specified

I am passing on my old PC to someone and want to over write all the empty space on the HDD to make sure no data is transferred.

I have re-installed Windows 7 and am trying to use the Windows "Cipher" feature to accomplish the task.

When I try to run cipher w/c: or cipher w/ c: or cipher w/:c I always get the same result - "Invalid Drive Specified".

How can my C drive be invalid?

R-

 

From Microsoft's web page on using cipher -




How to Use the Cipher Security Tool to Overwrite Deleted DataNote The cipher /w command does not work for files that are smaller than 1 KB. Therefore, make sure that you check the file size to confirm whether is smaller than 1 KB. This issue is scheduled to be fixed in longhorn.

To overwrite deleted data on a volume by using Cipher.exe, use the /w switch with the cipher command:

1. Quit all programs.
2. Click Start, click Run, type cmd, and then press ENTER.
3. Type cipher /w:folder, and then press ENTER, where folder is any folder in the volume that you want to clean. For example, the cipher /w:c:\test command causes all deallocated space on drive C to be overwritten. If C:\folder is a Mount Point or points to a folder on another volume, all deallocated space on that volume will be cleaned.

Data that is not allocated to files or folders is overwritten. This permanently removes the data. This can take a long time if you are overwriting a large amount of space.

Note the slash before the 'w' and a colon after.