I have some images on my drive that are persisting after an operating system install and multiple high strength drive wipes. Programs like Cipher and CCleaner aren't effective. The partition is small and I've filled it up with images in an attempt to overwrite the old ones, but the new ones instead of the deleted ones are wiped by a format/reinstall of Windows 7.
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Give CCleaner another try. Under advanced, check off "Wipe free space". This will write over all the free space on your drive with zeroes, which should accomplish what you're trying to do. It will take quite a long time, but should get the job done.
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Securely deleting files gets quite difficult with modern filesystems, since they don't do dumb block allocation like FAT32. Instead, rather sophisticated allocation strategies are used, which has the effect that overwriting an existing file doesn't necessarily mean that you're overwriting the old allocated block, but eventually complete others.
If you really want to keep your files safe from unauthorized access even after removal, you should consider encrypting your hard disk. There are good and secure programs for this out there, even free (as in freedom) ones, e.g. TrueCrypt.
Matthew Williams
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Andreas Wiese
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The Windows built-in Disk Cleanup utility can clear out a surprising amount of space, especially if you go to the "More Options" tab and select "Clean up..." under "System Restore and Shadow Copies".
Eric Dand
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Use a utility to write the drive with a pattern regardless of anything. That is write the drive with all 0's, or all 1's, or 01010101, etc. You would need to boot from USB, CD, or other disk to do this unless you know the physical location of the files and could partition around the files and write the pattern to the partition only.
Damon
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