hello, all.

in case the title doesn't say it all (and I suppose now that I think about it, perhaps it doesn't), what I'd be most grateful for someone's help on is this: I'm faced with the task of "wiping" a Windows XP machine in a non-volatile fashion, that is, finding a way to to (securely) delete (overwrite) essentially all personal & non-system crap I've piled onto the blasted things over the months -- you know, cookies, caches, temp files & all that other sekret stuff -- but without doing the obvious, but destructive thing (ie, reformatting & doing a full system restore.)

thing is, yes I *know* you can't really delete anything when it comes to magnetic storage, if ya wanna be rilly, rilly sure of course you have to shred and melt down the physical storage medium, etc, etc, I know, I know, I know. but I don't need to be "really, really" sure, just, umm, pretty sure will do, for this case.

so I guess what I'm asking for is, what do I need to know about the XP file system in order to be able to write a few simple scripts to "safely" overwrite (ie, temporarily creat enull files in the place of) essentially all non-used blocks on my hard drive, without of course (and this is the "safely" part) deleting or breaking anything that Windows actually needs to be Windows. 'cause again, the goal is not to destroy someone else's laptop, just to "clean out my desk".

again I know this isn't gonna be 100% secure, so please no pedagogical lectures about information security. 99% or so sure will do for now.

(oh and did someone say, "why the hell are you asking this on perlmonks?" answer: above all things, perl is about usefulness, and about working with open systems; so I'd like to think this is a very pragmatic, useful thing I'm trying to do, and of course (if there's some horrid, messy traversing / inspecting / probing / prodding / violating of orifices to be done on the Windows filesys, we'd most like to do such poking / prodding / violating in perl.) plus also I could just use a big, thick clue here, and cluefulness is I believe a generic property of perlmonks, that is to so, not strictly limited to the domain of perl.)

thank you very much 

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2006-01-12 Retitled by holli, as per Monastery guidelines
Original title: 'in vivo sublimification of a windows machine'

In reply to OT: in vivo sublimification of a windows machine by R Pentomino

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