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 / 7 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: about 1 year 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: about 1 year 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: over 1 year ago

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

You have game files in your system yet , you need to remove it, you can use drbuho.com to find and fix it. Source: about 1 year ago