Anyone have an answer to that question?

Sometimes formatting has a bad sector check that overwrites all the sectors with a test pattern.
Even so, a pass over free space with a secure delete program would be a good idea to make sure.

Aaron, these are terrible stories I've read here. Last month I was downloading what I thought was a legal adult movie and when I previewed it halfway through I saw it was kp. Needless to say I deleted it but everything I've read here has me extremely scared and paranoid. I keep hearing the only way to truly rid something from your hd is to destroy the drive itself. I was in the market for a new computer anyway and from all I've read I'm tempted to just destroy this one and go ahead and get a new one. And thoughts would be appreciated.

A guy who accidentally halfway downloads something dodgy and then deletes the scraps is
certainly not guilty of anything. Since your disk is already active and full of data a defrag will be
enough to finish off the last bits of it.

that one slipped by me...

NO...

reformatting does not write data to every sector, rather sets up a filesystem that the OS is able to see and sets all areas of the disc as being writable (i.e. as if there is no data whatsoever on the HDD, which for a reformat there's still plenty of organized 0's and 1's)...like the ancient, 4GB limited fat32, and the modern NTFS formats....

using the previously linked to Darin's Boot and Nuke program will overwrite the whole disc so that one can start over again cleanly...as cleanly as using a shiny fresh out of the box HDD...said drive might not last as long as a brand spanking new one (though with recent rumblings in the tech community this is very arguable), but it will be as clean as one!

and this information should really be applied anytime a user needs a new, clean start....'things' can reside on a HDD forever if not actively overwritten, and even then if its a real nasty bugger it will just move out of the way, as it were, as the writing heads approach it!

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So Long and Thanks for All the Files
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Not always. Sometimes a format just resets the disk structure and scans for
obvious errors without actually overwriting and testing every sector.

I've faced this problem as well. I qued some videos the other night and later watched them to find that some were KP. I deleted them. Then I previewed some of those still in que and deleted some more that were iffy.

I thought I was good, then I realized about a week later that I forgot to delete the file fragments or whatever. However, I don't even share my files, nor do I share file fragments, so do I have anything to worry about?

I also didn't know that a regular delete wasn't secure. So I guess my HD still has fragments on it. This sucks. I think I'm fixing to uninstall limewire. Too much trouble.

A defrag will reliably scrub the remains. If you have Norton's software you
can set Speed disk to run every night.

Since you're not building or sharing major collections the authorities have no
interest in you whatsoever and even in the impossibly rare case they do, you
can reasonably assert your innocence by the fact you did delete the few files
you did get by accident.

also,
can you not be charged if "they" just have the log showing you downloaded this trash... is that why they take your comp and search for the illegal files?