yes and no.yes if you use an erase utility. i use ace utieitils but i paid for it, a free one i read about is Eraser. what these programs do is they rewrite the file on the hard drive with random data. the programs claim that the process makes it impossible to recover that's where the no comes into play.no because since there is a program to random the data, there's programs that unscramble that and possibly can recover the information. POSSIBLY