hi,
my suggestion for secure file and folder deletion or wiping free hd space (including mft on ntfs partitions) is sysinternals sdelete. its a free and small (46kb zip, no installation needed) commandline utility.
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysintern...sk/SDelete.mspx
it uses the department of defense clearing and sanitizing standard dod 5220.22-m, but number of overwrites can be manually set for security freaks like me. file and folder name entries in the filesystem get wiped too:
"To overwrite file names of a file that you delete, SDelete renames the file 26 times, each time replacing each character of the file's name with a successive alphabetic character. For instance, the first rename of foo.txt would be to AAA.AAA".
it can also delete all free space including mft on ntfs systems. remind that file and folder names of already deleted files cannot be deleted securely because rebuilding the filesystem would be needed:
"The reason that SDelete does not securely delete file names when cleaning disk free space is that deleting them would require direct manipulation of directory structures. Directory structures can have free space containing deleted file names, but the free directory space is not available for allocation to other files. Hence, SDelete has no way of allocating this free space so that it can securely overwrite it."
the best secure delete utility for advanced users in my opinion, very usefull for batch files, sendto entries, startupscripts... check homepage for more details.