Do you think when you empty the Recycle Bin, everything is gone for good? Well that is not necessarily the case. When you delete data from hard drive, only references related to the data are removed, the data still reside in your hard disk ready to be retrieved by several applications which capable of performing this particular task.
If you have sensitive data that you don't want others to look at or to try digging deep inside your computer, Hard Drive Eraser can really save your day. It is a free program, purposely built to completely remove data from the hard drive partitions.
Hard drive Eraser works both in Windows XP and Windows Vista operating system; supports FAT32, NTFS and FAT file systems. It is capable of erasing the whole physical hard drives or individual partitions, of course except the primary partition. Basically, it overwrites the data with junk binary data making it impossible to recover the original data from the hard drive.
Technically, Hard Drive Eraser uses four algorithms to erase the data, the first one just writes zeros and is the simplest among the four. The second “DOD 5220-22.M” is the default one which overwrites data in three phases with random values. Third one complies with the US Army specification for deletion and the last one Peter Guttman method which overwrites data in 35 passes (much slow slower though).
Hard Drive Eraser is a free program (did I mention it?) for Windows XP and Vista licensed under GPL,
[tags]Freeware, hard drive eraser[/tags]
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