Parted Magic VS SDelete

You could, for example, boot your computer to an operating system which resides on a USB stick, and then examine the health of your existing drive.... Booting to something like Parted Magic, since it has most of the tools you'd need for "fixing" hard drives, already included with the OS. All that would take, is a USB stick, and a computer to download and mount the image on the stick (with a program like YUMI). Source: 11 months ago

But, ranting aside, you can use either * GParted Live, or * PartedMagic To boot into a linux OS and modify the drive's partitions. Specifically you'll want to move the “D:” disk partition to make the unallocated space next to the disk partition you want to extend. Source: 11 months ago

Purchase a copy of Parted Magic. https://partedmagic.com/. I buy one every few years. Supports the maintainer. Great set of tools. Source: 12 months ago

Purchase a copy of parted magic. Great utility Linux distro. I buy a new version every few years. https://partedmagic.com/. Source: 12 months ago

For future reference, running something like Active KillDisk or Parted Magic against the drive multiple passes should be more than sufficient to prevent most all recovery unless you're dealing with a government entity. Source: 12 months ago

What lessons can we take away from my story? They are, in fact, quite simple and obvious: merely deleting files and quick formatting is usually not enough when disposing of or selling hard drives. For more assurance, it’s better to perform a full format (in modern operating systems, of course). And for the truly paranoid, there’s the good old console utility SDelete from the Sysinternals suite or a tool named... - Source: dev.to / 6 months ago

I assume you were using a dynamically expanding disk - if so just note it won't dynamically contract just by deleting files. To shrink the drive you will likely need to run sdelete -z on the drive inside the VM to clear the free space, then edit and compact the VHDX. You will need to be able to boot the VM to run sdelete though so you'll need to temporarily move other files off the drive, or move the VM files to... Source: 11 months ago

You can always download sdelete https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/sdelete and do an overwrite pass just to be safe. It'll take a while but you can do other things while it's running. Source: 11 months ago

My understanding is that it doesn't completely solve it. I don't have time to dig up an authoritative source for this claim — hopefully this superuser comment will suffice. I believe that you can achieve something close to a secure erase by filling up your SSD to 100% capacity with data before deleting; the utility sdelete supposedly does this when using the -c option. Source: about 1 year ago

Check out sdelete from the MS sysinternals utilities suite: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/sdelete. Source: about 1 year ago