Quote from: xblackbladex on January 03, 2013, 12:26 amQuote from: astor on January 03, 2013, 12:11 amThe National Institute of Standards and Technology approves of only one way to securely erase data like hospital records and sensitive government documents, and that's a full random write over the entire hard disk. Writing over individual files is unsafe on a journaled filesystem, and doubly so the way Windows defragments and moves files around. An individual file can be written to multiple locations on a hard disk, and a program that "securely erases" individual files will only write over the last location.An boot disk like DBAN is your best option. It does two random writes followed by one write of zeroes to make it look like no data erasure / cover up happened. That's may seem extreme, because you have reinstall your OS, but anything less is mirage of security.I learned in my IT class that if they are really hardcore searching your hdd, one write of zeros may not be enough. Are there any utilities that you guys know of that can write over it multiple times, I'm thinking like 16x at least!And yes I expected that true destruction of evidence would involve wiping the OS, I was just hoping there might be other options.To the best of my knowledge, no one (with the possible exception of the intelligence agencies) can recover data from a disk that has been wiped using one or more random passes, then zeroed-out. I had a friend who was hit with a Word macro-virus -- their files appeared intact, in that the file names/file sizes were correct, but the contents had been zeroed-out. They lost years of documents, and even though they approached a well respected data-recovery service, nothing whatsoever could be recovered. NC