Where do files go when they are deleted from a hard drive?

Answer 1

It goes to the Recycle Bin, of course. Then if you delete it the second time (from the Bin), it gets deleted as if you'd deleted it in DOS - which is to say it gets marked as deleted; you can restore it if you don't overwrite it first, and you need to supply the first letter of the file name.

Answer 2

When files are deleted from a hard drive, they just disappear. It is the same thing as writing a sentence on a piece of paper and then taking an eraser and erasing the sentence. When you take a pencil and write a sentence on a piece of paper and then take an eraser and erase the sentence, where does the sentence go? A deleted file goes the same place.

Answer 3

When a file is deleted, Windows will try to send the file to a special folder called the "Recycle Bin" unless told not to by the user (via prompt box or shift-delete command). If the file is deleted without being sent to the Recycle Bin, The only thing that is acutally erased it the index of that file on the hard drive.

When the computer writes a file to the hard drive, the file is often broken up (fragmented) and written to different sectors of the hard drive. The specific sectors that are written to are normally selected by how fast the drive can write to it. This means that all of the sectors that contain the parts of a specific file may not always be next to one another. Therefore, the hard drive has an index that tells the computer which sectors to read in order to retrieve the file.

When the file is deleted, it is much faster to delete the reference to the file than it is to find and delete the information in each sector that contain the file. Then, the next time a file needs to be written, if one or more of the sectors containing the previous file are written to, the hard drive will ignore the information that is already there and write over it with the new information.