On all my partitions, I have litterally thousands of entries referring to
deleted files, all starting with ?, e.g. ?eadme.txt
These are not normally visible, but they consume a lot of space and are
copied along when I make a DriveImage of that partition.

What is the best program (if any) to clean up these rubbish-files?


Sorry I goofed, I meant a ? instead of a ~

Try Using Window Washer. It really works in getting rid of all the leftover junk other programs leave behind. heres a link. http://www.webroot.com/wb/index.php?pc=4060&rc=1&ps=R&oc=5&mjv=5&mnv=0&bld=1&cd=&dcc=&drc=&mo=&sid=

Hope this helps!

I made a mistake in the original title and text.
It gets a question-mark ( ? ) instead of the tilde ( ~ )
at postion 1 in the DOS-alias name, but the file is not
physically deleted.
These files can be seen with e.g. "Deleted File Analysis Utility"
from "Executive Software". These are NOT the same files as visible
in Explorer.

It is this slack from deleted file that I want to erase completely
to free up space.
I don't want to RECOVER them, so utilities like Window Washer are
useless for this purpose.

Any other suggestions please....

I'm not exactly sure what you are wanting to do, but if you need to delete files so they are not recoverable, your best bet is something like Norton's Wipe Info(Part of Norton Utilities) Wipe Info will make it gone, it uses DoD 5220.22-M Government wipe method with multiple write passes.

Hi StormBringer and thank you,
I want to eliminate the leftovers of a deleted file.
As Windows (and/or DOS) deletes a file, its first character of that filename is replaced with a questionmark and becomes invisible for the likes of Explorer. From such a moment onwards, the space occupied by the deleted file becomes available again in the FAT-table, but the deleted file is still physically there until it is over-written by some new file.
I have about 75MB of such deleted files on my C-partition (10GB) alone, and another almost 300MB on various other partitions.

It is this space (occupied by DELETED files whose names start with a ?) that I want to recover.

In the meantime I found a utility called "Directory Snoop", that more or less can do what I want, but I am looking for something more user-friendly, if anybody knows such a pgm.

I hope this clarifies what I really want.

Thanks in advance

What you described can be done using Wipe Info, not sure how it handles files that have already been tagged as deleted by the OS, though it does actually delete files, since it doesn't just tag them as being deleted.

There are several apps that will do this, I'm sure some are easier to use than others, some probably have more or less options and so on..
I'm pretty sure if you go to somewhere like download.com, you can probably do a search for Wipe Info or delete and come up with several to choose from.

http://www.sysinternals.com/ntw2k/source/sdelete.shtml

give this a try. pretty nifty.

Thank you all for your help.

After working with "Directory Snoop", I found it can do exactly what I wanted, and in a very efficient way (after I found out how to work the programs's "Purge" command).

Norton WipeInfo, Window Washer etc. are only useful for wiping EXISTING files, not for recovering the space occupied by already DELETED files.

The proggie as mentioned by filthy_mcnasty is a rather old command-line program, although its pedigree is OK. I remember I had it years ago but never liked it because of no GUI.

I am happy with Directory Snoop.
Case closed as far as I am concerned, thank you all again.

Would you know how to retrieve the files/folders deleted by Norton Antivirus Wipe Info. If you do, send an email to bigpanda_88@hotmail.com or tranqtri33@hotmail.com. Thank You!

You can't.