BleepingComputer.com: Sensitive Data Incineration

Hello, I would like to know how I can rid my PC of specific data, permanently.

You see, I am in possession of some... sensitive material. Material that must not, under any circumstances, be discovered. What material is for me to know only. I'm sorry if this complicates things, but my mom will flog me if she finds this!

I have already stored the data on a flash drive and deleted all left overs I could find, but I know that there are still traces in my laptop.

How can I track down every little piece of leftovers and erase, shred and incinerate them permanently?

Help is greatly appreciated!

The only way to do it with any certainty is to wipe the drive clean and run a couple passes of 0's over the drive
http://www.killdisk.com/
http://www.dban.org/

This post has been edited by garmanma: 15 April 2009 - 12:14 PM

Do you mean formatting the whole HD? That is not an option, as I have nowhere to store data I don't want to lose.

The software you linked to, what does it do exactly?

This post has been edited by Mcwierdo: 15 April 2009 - 12:39 PM

DO NOT USE EITHER ONE
They will wipe the drive clean

Try File Shredder:
http://www.fileshredder.org/

Just be sure you have it pointed to the correct file to shred

This post has been edited by garmanma: 15 April 2009 - 04:44 PM

garmanma, on Apr 15 2009, 10:44 PM, said:

Alright! This is the right software, but I also need to find the data to remove. I need to remove traces of the data, not the data itself.

garmanma, on Apr 15 2009, 01:13 PM, said:

Do these also wipe the Hardware/Host Protected Area HPA? If not, do you know of anything (preferably freeware) that does?

Mcwierdo. You may want to look into a program called TrueCrypt. I use it to encrypt my USB drive and the Entire System Drive on My laptop. Its a great program and I have had a few "friends" try and hack it. This should hide your precious umm "files" from prying eyes. It has hidden features that allow you to hide all traces of the program. Choose a goood password that no one will guess. I used a 256 bit WPA key generator You can also use a Thumb scanner to speed up the log on process. Just dont get your fingers cut off.

I've been reading about the HPA and the DCO. It seems like it's possible to redefine the amount of space the HPA uses (which could include defining it to zero) as well as to recover it, but I haven't found anything which actually removes it yet except for very expensive forensic hardware/software. Do some new hard drives come with these and others not? Is there any harddrive manufacturer which produces a harddrive that already meets dod standards before it ever comes out of the box?