C Drive eraser

Hi everyone,

I'm in need of some advice - hope i'm in the right area.... The IT department where I work is giving me a new work lap top later this afternoon - they'll be taking my old one away and probably tossing it after transferring all required work files. Before they come I'd like to make sure my C Drive are clean - nothing major on the drive but the odd e-mail I've opened has sent me to porn sites which pop and pop and pop etc - probably the odd picture and MPEG (Tommy and Pam..) have been saved. This company is pretty anal and fired a security guard last week for looking at porn. I think I've wiped all the jpegs and mpegs, the history, cookies etc off but I'm driving blind - not sure what all i should be looking at. Can anyone make any recommendations and/or programs to download - I see major geeks has lots of them but I don't know anything about them. My opereating system is Windows NT - workstation version 4.0 . Also i don't have administrator access.

Any help or suggestions would be very much appreciated !!!

 

have you deleted your temp folders?
and formating would help
IMHO

 

It's the fact that they need to have the "work files" that's a bother, so you can't just format and overwrite the whole thing.
Here's a little freeware that will overwrite all of the free space, after you get rid of (delete) all of the things you can, so that only the CIA could retrieve the former content of the free space.

http://www.wizard-industries.com/sdel.html

First, clean the drive up with an evidence eliminator from Major Geeks. Then defragment the drive twice, and then run SureDelete Disk. It'll overwrite three times, and it'll take a while, so count on, say, 40 minutes for 20 Gigs of free space.

 

yes I've deleted the temp folders but I was told that even after you delete them the 'free space' can still be accessed... not sure what that means though.

What do you mean by formatting?

Thanks for the help

 

See post above, marky. We got out of order.

 

Hi Wisewiz - thanks for the help - much appreciated - I'll give it a try!!

 

Hi wiz wise - do you have any reccomendations for an 'evidence eliminator' major geeks seems to have a lot of them - should I be paying the big bucks for one or are there free ones he lists oK. Also, not sure what you mean by defragment the drive... sorry I'm new at this.

 

If you search Major Geeks for "evidence tracks" you'll pull up a lot of choices. Then try just tracks or just evidence.

Some of the commercial programs are free to try. If the trialware's fully functional and you only need it this once, that might be the way to go.

 

Thanks Halo !! - just what I needed to know - I'll give it a shot.

 

Aargh! Well, I'm not sure you CAN defrag, but try opening My Computer (double-click) then right-click the drive letter (C:, probably) and choose Properties, then click Tools at the top of the panels that show up, and click Defragment somewhere there. Once you get it to defragment the drive (AFTER you've cleaned up as much as you can), close all those windows, and then re-open them the same way and defrag the same drive AGAIN.

THEN, when all that's done, is the time to use SureDelete, and use the DISK part of it: it has two parts, the disk and the FILE part. If you need help with it, come on back.
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ANYBODY ELSE who HAS NT4 running right now could help us out here: This new member doesn't know how to get to the defragger, and NEEDS it.
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hi whiz - thanks for the suggestion - I followed your steps but the defragmentation function is not enabled on my computer.

 

Hi whiz and others - thanks for all the help - this was my first experience in a chat room of any kind and I'm amazed and gratefull for all the help I recieved. I've started the Disk cleaner and will have to log off to help speed it up.

Best fishes

Marky

 

MS didn't include a defragger with NT 4.0

We used Diskeeper back in the day... the current lite (free) version should work. http://www.majorgeeks.com/download1207.html

 

robo and alan: Thanks for dropping in on this one.

marky:
Come back with a report and questions, if any. Happy to help. We understand the need to clean the machine of everything you know about and DON'T know about before handing it over to a judgmental third party.

If you can get the cleaner to do its job, you may be able to skip the download and install of Diskeeper Lite.

Let us know, whatever.

 

Hi everyone,

Thanks for all your suggestions and links. Only time will tell how it all worked. I went through the C drive myself and got rid of all that I could (even though i didn't really understand what i was doing), then dowloaded something HALO recommended to further erase the C drive - then used the disk cleaner Wiz wise gave me - I think it was able to complete the 3 pass overs before the IS department dropped by to do their thing - it was a race against the clock - that disk cleaner does take some time... I've got my new lap top and they have my old one so hopefully all will be well... Thanks again!! If it all goes sour I'll try to let you know - if you don't hear from me again assume all your advice worked!

 

... OR what we suggested didn't work, and he's in deep, deep ...

(Hope he comes back with a good word.)

 

I think "Eraser"

http://www.tolvanen.com/eraser/

is one of the best and it's free. You can choose from using the Gutmann method (overwrite 35 times) to US DoD to a one pass. I also like how it integrates into a "right click" feature.

 

Just tried it, for a publicly available 'overwrite' system it does look pretty impressive so far.

 

Well, this isn't a "My utility's better than yours" contest, but I do recommend SureDelete, which is also free, also integrates into the right-click shell, lets you pick the number of passes, and overwrites a single file or just the free space on a drive or the whole drive, as you choose.

Link above in my first post about it. I only re-posted because we should make sure that readers KNOW that there's a choice of REALLY EFFECTIVE file destroyers and file- and drive-overwriters out there, and that using them protects you from snoopers at every level except the most wealthy and determined with unlimited time.

(And it's as easy as a right click and a contect menu switch, instead of using the Delete button.)

 

Yahbut, the company would have to spend a friggin FORTUNE on the Drive Recovery Outfit bills to get ANYthing useful back, once the drive has been overwritten by a utility like SureDelete with random characters a few times. Yes, it can be done, and yes, the CIA can afford it, but almost nobody else would EVER invest the time and the money to get back bits and scraps from a multiple-pass-overwritten drive.

 

secure deletion

Peter Gutmann's paper is an interesting, albeit technical, read.
See it here
It's also interesting to read the freeware and shareware delete utilities author's two cents worth re effective and 'secure' removal of the porn that "accidentally" got into your computer.