Recycle Bin & deleted files
P
there anyway to insure that they are infact gone for good. I would like to
be able to verify that a file no longer in on the hard drive. If there is a
way to do this in VB that would be cool...but dos would be fine. Any help
would be of course greatly appreciated.
Thanks
P.
Robert S. Stein
manner simply deletes the file entry from the FAT (file allocation
table). However, there are programs which will overwrite the file,
often overwriting it several times to meet military security
requirements. A less viable alternative is to reformat the drive. :-)
Bob
Arthur E. Sowers
On Sun, 9 Jun 2002, P wrote:
> In Windows where do the files go after your empty the recycle bin and is
> there anyway to insure that they are infact gone for good.
There may be Windows utilities out there that will write zeros to all the
unallocated space on your drive. Norton's Utilities for DOS has a
'wipeinfo' utility that does this. I don't know if NU for Windows has, but
it should. If you have a lot of unused space, it can take a long time to
do this. Hence, its sometimes good to have a small partition for just
working files. Otherwise, you are right, the bit pattern is still there
and can be recovered with 'undelete' utilities, at least unless that
memory area has been overwritten.
A cheap alternative is to make some asci files with nothing but zeros, and
save them as identical files but with different filenames until the free
space is all filled up (but at least some verisons of Windows complain
with error messages if you have less than 50-100 MB of free space left).
Norton's also has a disk editor where you can look directly at any
addressable memory location on your HD and see the bit pattern that is
there (as hex, and through one of several filters), so you can show
yourself the zeros.
Some other guys on the NG may have a resource on alternative 'wipeinfo'
utilities.
P
e.g. Origional File Name = MyText.txt
Deleted File Name = ~yText.txt
But I am not sure about this.
If this is the case it would seem that you could infact hunt for those files
on your drive via dos and subsequently delete once again. Right??
Questions??
In what directory does windows place the file after a detletion from the
recycle bin?
How do you get to the Recycle Bin from DOS?
Does the file still retain it's origional directory path with it's FAT
reference removed?
Thanks!!
"P" <poh...@bham.rr.com> wrote in message
news:tkOM8.211676$Q42.9...@typhoon.austin.rr.com...
Richard Collins
> I think that after delting Windows changes the file name.
> e.g. Origional File Name = MyText.txt
> Deleted File Name = ~yText.txt
> But I am not sure about this.
>
> If this is the case it would seem that you could infact hunt for those
files
> on your drive via dos and subsequently delete once again. Right??
>
> Questions??
> In what directory does windows place the file after a detletion from
the
> recycle bin?
> How do you get to the Recycle Bin from DOS?
> Does the file still retain it's origional directory path with it's FAT
> reference removed?
It doesn't "place" the files anywhere. It changes the first character of the
file name and frees up all the clusters in the FAT. The file remains on the
disk, where it was - but there is nothing to "point" to it.
Noumenon
But file is still on the disk until it is overwriten by some other files.
There are so many utilities to permanently delete files.
the same file depot - ftp.simtel.net has dozens and dozens of small but very
efficient command-line utilities to erase files for ever.
Many FTP servers in the net have tons of system and secutity utils that can
do this job.
I have one small utility for wiping files and I am using it from time to
time
- when I want to ensure file's gone for ever.
Richard Collins
"Noumenon" <ArtE...@concentric.net> wrote in message
news:3D030B12...@concentric.net...
> Any program normally just deletes entry in first cluster of a file.
No, it deletes the data in all the clusters. If it didn't, the clusters
could not be re-used because the system would have no way of knowing that
they were "available".
It does replace the first character of the file name in the diretory entry,
though. Perhaps that's what you're thinking of.
Chris Hodges
>
> "Noumenon" <ArtE...@concentric.net> wrote in message
> news:3D030B12...@concentric.net...
> > Any program normally just deletes entry in first cluster of a file.
>
> No, it deletes the data in all the clusters. If it didn't, the clusters
> could not be re-used because the system would have no way of knowing that
> they were "available".
It doesn't delete the data - that's the point - it only deletes the pointer to
the data (by deleting the entry from the FAT).
> It does replace the first character of the file name in the diretory entry,
> though. Perhaps that's what you're thinking of.
Similarly the first character is cleared (replaced by a null) the character you
see is the one your undelete program/OS decides to show you.
Chris
Van
For more information look site http://www.r-tt.com
Good luck!
> >
> >