I used ccleaner to wipe the free space on my hard drive so I can overwrite files that had already been deleted. I checked the "Wipe Free Space" box and also the "Wipe MTF Free Space" box. My hard disc has 103 GB of free space and I read this would take a very long time, however, I let it run over night and it was done within like 8 hours. Is that normal? Did it actually overwrite all my deleted files or is there something I may have done wrong in the settings?
Sounds perfectly likely that your wipe was successful
Also, is doing the 7 pass overwrite multiple times as effective as doing the 35 Gutmann passes once?
doing the 35 pass algorithm isn't significantly more effective because it's an algorithm designed for older specifications of hard drives, and isn't really useful to run on IDE/SATA. Running the 7pass is more than sufficient.
And, without wishing to be endlessly dogmatic about this, an hour's enjoyable searching on this forum will show why one pass is absolutely sufficient, effective, and acceptable. Your WFS would then probably take about 30 mins or so.