here are a huge number of third-party tools to allow you to securely wipe all the data on a hard disk in Windows, but did you know that Windows 7 itself contains a hidden utility for not only wiping data on drives, but also down to specific folders if you wish?
While I’ve been writing my new book, Troubleshooting Windows 7 Inside Out, I’ve had to research all sorts of stuff in Windows 7 (and I’ll be sharing more in coming weeks) and one of the little gems I found is a command line utility called Cipher.exe.
This is run from the Command Prompt (you’ll need to run it as an Administrator) and is simplicity itself to use.
The command is Simply cipher /w x:\folder where you would substitute x:\folder for the location you want wiped, for instance your D:\ drive or yourC:\Users\Mike Halsey\Music folder.
In the help for the command it says it…
removes data from available unused disk space on the entire volume. If this option is chosen, all other options are ignored. The directory specified can be anywhere in a local volume. If it is a mount point of points to a directory in another volume, the data on that volume will be removed.
This will then write 1s, 0s and then random characters to each sector of the drive to securely wipe the data.
This is but one purpose of the cipher tool which is generally used to backup and restore encryption keys for the EFS (Encrypted File System) system that’s been around since Windows 2000. This wipe feature though is new to Windows 7.
I would always recommend you use any tool like this with extreme care, but if you are dumping a hard drive or replacing an ageing PC, this is an excellent and completely free way to wipe your data forever.
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