On  6 May 98 at 18:59, Harvey Rose wrote:

> If a hard drive is partitioned in two or more drives and files are deleted
> on the one drive,

  You have two partitions.

> can anyone tell me if the one drive is not written to
> (the deleted files drive), but the other drives are written to, will this
> trash the deleted files completly? ie. over write the deleted files space.

  You delete files on one, and write to the other.

  In the general case, there is no guarantee that new file writes
will be written to space recently made available by file deletions.
[Have you ever defragmented your drive?  Watch the "Details" screen
as it runs.  It will, by the way, overwrite space that used to be
deleted files, if you select either "Full defragmentation" or
"Consolodate free space" under the "Advanced" settings.]
  There are a few security programs out there that do ensure that
deleted data gets overwritten, but the simplest way to be sure is to
overwrite all of the free space on the disk with a temporary file,
and then delete it.

  In the specific case you ask about, however, the files are on
separate partitions.  Each partition "owns" all of the disk space
that is allocated to it; when full, it will not suddenly start
writing into another partition.  So while the general answer to your
question is "no, with some suggestions" (above), the answer to your
specific question is "NO, it doesn't work that way".

David G