[ciatogowl]

When I search my external hard drive, files that I have deleted months ago still appear in the results window. When I try to delete these items again, I receive an error message stating that the item no longer exists. How do I get rid of these items?

[telecom69]

Only by waiting till they get overwritten by something else on the drive ...deleting them just hides them from view but also allows the space occupied by them to be overwritten by something else,when that happens you won't see them anymore ...

I did read about this on another site and you could try this I suppose if you want to ...

If you would like to erase and wipe all information from your harddrive, I reccommend you use Active@ KillDisk. This powerful and compact DOS software allows you to destroy all data on hard and floppy drives completely, excluding any possibility of future recovery of deleted files and folders. This is security software for unrecoverable data elimination for any computer capable of booting in DOS mode from floppy drive. It uses access to the drive's data on a physical level via BIOS bypassing logical drive structure organization, thus it does not matter operating systems and file systems located on the machine, it can be DOS, Windows 95 / 98, Windows NT / 2000 / XP, Linux, Unix for PC. Active@ KillDisk conforms to US Department of Defense clearing and sanitizing standard DoD 5220.22-M. You can be sure that once you clean up with Active@ KillDisk, sensitive information is purged out forever. We highly recommend you to run this FREE utility for the hard and floppy drives you want to dispose of, recycle, re-use, sell or donate to somebody.

Please note: If the CIA or FBI is after you, destroy the hard drive. It is possible to recover data even if it has been erased and written over many times.
Source(s):
http://www.killdisk.com/
http://www.download.com/Active-Kill-Disk…