Suggestions for a free disk wiping program

I'm looking for a good free program that wipes the EMPTY parts of a hard drive (ie I want to remove traces of things that were deleted in the past).
Anyone have any suggestion of what's available?
I'd like the program to operate quickly, if possible, and perhaps offer different 'scrubbing' options.
Oliver

 

Eraser

 

all you need is one pattern
the question is which one

Gutmann's original paper: "Secure Deletion of Data from Magnetic and Solid-State Memory"

 

Definitely ERASER, but Guttman is a 35-pass method that is overkill in the extreme. The very paper linked to at the bottom of Ice Czar's post by Peter Gutmann has an epilogue that reads:

This is gone over time and time again. I wish Garrett would just remove Gutmann's method as an option from ERASER. Gutmann himself has said, on more than one occassion, that seeing his "method" on scrubbing programs is embarrasing as it's no more effective than a few random passes.

 

Just found this freebie that looks good with many options.

ncleaner - http://www.nkprod.ro/ncleaner/

 

and if the data in question is so sensitive that it requires being overwritten past a single simple zeroing,

it should be encrypted to start with

 

Hi, Ice_Czar

The one I like 8F.


Take Care,
TheQuest

 

Another vote for eraser

oldmx