really deleting

[Andrew Donehue]

Hi All!
           I am after a program that will go through an ext2 based 
filesystem and look for any deleted files, and actually zero out the 
contents of that deleted file on the hdd..... The reason for this is.....

I spent about 10hrs setting up a server the way I like it, I seem to be 
setting up 4+ of these a month, so instead of wasting 10hrs each time, I 
disk dumped the hdd (everything - the hardware is always the same) - ran 
it through gzip, and sent it to a file.... The server install is only 
about 400MB in size, but I stuffed up in the initial one, and had to 
delete some files..... problem is that dd only looks at bits, it doesn't 
care that the file was deleted.... it still compresses the contents of 
the file... (that is left over after a normal delete... only a marker to 
the file is deleted...) - and my image is about 4GB in size!

I should be able to fit the image onto a  CD (as the OS install is 
around 400MB....) - the remaining is the compressed files that I 
deleted.... (unrequired junk)

I have seen programs around that do deletes and replace with random 
data, but I was after one that went over the old space and zero'ed out 
any spare space.... Any suggestions?


Cheers,
            Andrew