Resolved Securely Wiping Only the -Free- Disk Space

Alex Ethridge · 2013/08/09

I have asked this question at least three times over several years past. The question was (words to the effect), "What is the best way to securely wipe only the free space of a hard disk. ". I got some suggestions at the time but none mentioned what I found on PCMag.com today. Here's the 'meat' part of the article:

Wipe Free Disk Space:
Launch a command prompt and type "cipher /w:X" (sans quotes) where X is the letter of the drive or partition you want to wipe. Press enter.

I hope this helps someone.

You can see the whole article here. There are a lot of useful tips there.

Top Ten Windows 7 Hidden Features

retiredlearner · 2013/08/10

Thanks Alex. Good reading. Did you utilise the wipe method? Neil.

Arie · 2013/08/10

I never had the need for it, but yea, this has been possible since Windows 2000 (SP3) (see How To Use Cipher.exe to Overwrite Deleted Data in Windows).

Arie · 2013/08/10

Now, you can also use Microsoft's SDelete to do the same.

The advantage of SDelete is that you can specify number of overwrite passes, something you can't do with Cipher.

Alex Ethridge · 2013/08/10

I just finished running a test of Cipher. I ran EasyRecovery on a drive containing 7.63 Gigs of active files and EasyRecovery "recovered" over 15 gigabytes of files.

I put "recovered" in quotes because EasyRecovery also "recovers" the undeleted/active files.

I ran Cipher /w:d and ran EasyRecovery again. It recovered 7.63 gigabytes which exactly matched the active files on D.

So, it appears to work.

SpywareDr · 2013/08/11

CCleaner > Tools > Drive Wiper > Free Space Only > 1, 3, 7 or 35 passes.

Admin. · 2013/09/03

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Alex Ethridge · 2013/09/03

Okay, but it wasn't a problem; it was a discovery I wanted to share.

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Resolved Securely Wiping Only the -Free- Disk Space

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Resolved Securely Wiping Only the -Free- Disk Space

Alex Ethridge Well-Known Member Thread Starter

retiredlearner SuperGeek WindowsBBS Team Member

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