Zero filling

Our man in Havana

What is the best way to zero fill the free space on a hard disk?

Frank Grimes

The HD manufacturers generally have utilities on their site to low level format a drive.
bootdisk.com has some good links too but it seems to be down at the moment.

Anima

Whats zero filling?

Frank Grimes

It's low level formatting, completely wipes the HD.

Our man in Havana

I only want to wipe the free space not the complete drive with o/s and data.

Capt'n Midnight

There are some secuity apps that do this.
eg:

ERASER v5.3 - Erase data permanently. Free.
An advanced security tool allows overwriting
of sensitive data with carefully selected
patterns. Drag and drop files and folders to
the on-demand eraser, use the convenient
Explorer shell extension or use the
integrated scheduler to program overwriting
of unused disk space or, for example, browser
cache files to happen regularly. Freeware for
Win9x/NT/2K. http://www.tolvanen.com/eraser/.

LegacyUser

really cheap and chearfull, copy & paste to notepad and save as vbs,
just creates a monstrous text file gigabytes large, fills up all your free space

set a = createobject("scripting.filesystemobject")
set b = a.createtextfile("c:\test.txt")
for a = 1 to 10000000000
b.writeline("type tonnes and tonnes and tonnes of crap here")
next

LFCFan

Cyberscrub is a great tool. It actually wipes the magnetic signature so it completly wiped and can't even be recovered using Hardware tools.