How to reset an NTFS MFT for no tracks of deleted files names to be found there

Warning: Modern disk/SSD hardware and modern filesystems may squirrel away data in places where you cannot delete them, so this process may still leave data on the disk. The only safe ways of wiping data are the ATA Secure Erase command (if implemented correctly), or physical destruction. Also see How can I reliably erase all information on a hard drive?

You can use a suite of tools called secure-delete.

sudo apt-get install secure-delete

This has four tools:

srm - securely delete an existing file
smem - securely delete traces of a file from ram
sfill - wipe all the space marked as empty on your hard drive
sswap - wipe all the data from you swap space.

From the man page of srm

srm is designed to delete data on mediums in a secure manner which can not be recovered by thiefs, law enforcement or other threats. The wipe algorithm is based on the paper "Secure Deletion of Data from Magnetic and Solid-State Memory" presented at the 6th Usenix Security Symposium by Peter Gutmann, one of the leading civilian cryptographers.

The secure data deletion process of srm goes like this:

• 1 pass with 0xff
• 5 random passes. /dev/urandom is used for a secure RNG if available.
• 27 passes with special values defined by Peter Gutmann.
• 5 random passes. /dev/urandom is used for a secure RNG if available.
• Rename the file to a random value
• Truncate the file

As an additional measure of security, the file is opened in O_SYNC mode and after each pass an fsync() call is done. srm writes 32k blocks for the purpose of speed, filling buffers of disk caches to force them to flush and overwriting old data which belonged to the file.

If you overwrite erased files, you shouldn't be able to retrieve anything from them.

My best guess is that either your wipe tool has not done everything it is supposed to or you have some sort of cache issue.

update - if you are using solid state drives, you may find that secure delete tools do not work as expected due to the way data is read/written on SSDs.