possible to delete date but leave Win '98 on old drive?

[GunsMadeAmericaFree]

My sister gave me a ~1999 computer and asked if we might be able to back up her music, documents and photos from it. It only had a CD burner drive, so it would have taken more than a dozen disks. I couldn't get it to recognize a USB flash drive in Windows '98, so that route was out. I ended up taking the hard drive out, using one of those 4 dollar IDE to SATA adapters to hook it up to my modern PC, then transferring all of the files to USB flash drive for her. I also burned to a double sided DVD to be safe.

I've deleted various programs on the drive, and now I find myself thinking about sticking the drive back in there and playing around with Windows '98 on it. Since it cost us exactly zero, I guess it would be an inexpensive way for the kids to play some older games and such. I'm tempted to see how many old and small games I can get onto a 10 Gigabyte hard drive.

The only trouble is that I promised my sister that I would delete her personal files. Normally I would use a utility like disk boot and nuke, zerofill, or what have you. However, I would like to actually preserve the Windows '98 OS that is on there this time.

I guess what I'd like to do is find a utility that will preserve data that is currently on the hard drive, but move things around on other areas of the drive, making it highly unlikely that anyone would ever be able to resurrect my sister's personal data.

Can anyone recommend a utility that would do this? Maybe something designed to test the drive by moving data around the empty areas would work? I've never wanted to do exactly this, so I'm not even sure quite what to call it.

Thanks!

 

[KingFatty]

I think you might be able to just wipe the empty portions of the disk.

You could use something like "Wipe Free Space" in the utility program CCleaner:
https://www.piriform.com/ccleaner

The free version should include that feature I believe.

 

[Coup27]

I think you might be able to just wipe the empty portions of the disk.

You could use something like "Wipe Free Space" in the utility program CCleaner:
https://www.piriform.com/ccleaner

The free version should include that feature I believe.

CCleaner does have a wipe free space feature as mentioned which may do what you're after.

Alternatively I think you could image the HDD, nuke it with a secure erase program and then recover the image to it?

 

[ntagger]

I'm just curious, are you afraid someone in your family will try and resurrect the files after you've deleted them? Can't you just nuke the drive once it's time to let go of the computer for good? Just a thought...

 

[GunsMadeAmericaFree]

Thanks, ccleaner was exactly what I was looking for. I wiped the empty areas of the drive 3 times.

No, I'm not worried that someone in our family will end up seeing it - I just wanted to take care of wiping the data now, while I was thinking about it. What if I waited, the kids used the computer, and then I died and my wife donated the computer to somebody else? Then, if that person found something and shared it..... I'm not going to make assumptions, I'd just rather take care of things now, up front.

 

[tweakboy]

Change in BIOS