Master File Table Windows Vista?

Question

Hello, my friend came over to fix my computer, and he ran a program that could view and restore deleted files, it was called recuva. I wanted to know if there was a way to delete them forever.

I heard that all of the file info is saved in the master file table, for instance, he was able to view pictures of my cat that I deleted like a year ago. If I format my hard drive or the master file table or whatever, is there a way that it will go away for ever?

I've tried winutilities file shredder, the was free space thing didn't work at all. Please tell me a way to get rid of these files permanenetly so they may never be recovered.

Answer 1

You can use eraser.exe, or ccleaner.exe to erase the contents of the files.

On the eraser.exe site there is also a bootable disk that over-writes the entire disk.

Finally there is a file sdelete.exe on sysinternals.com site. This file does a good job at getting rid of the file system pointers to the content areas in the file system. This part is tricky because multiple processes could be allocating files while it is running. It works really well when you want to securely delete a folder of files.

Lastly the easiest way to do this is to encrypt the entire disk with truecrypt. Once encrypted, the disk is basically noise. Then it really doesn't matter if someone could access your machine, because without the encryption password they can't see your data.