I put an ssd drive in my gf's laptop. I bought an external drive holder and put her old drive in that.

Since she uses Windoze, I said we better run a virus check on your old drive, using Windows Defender.

It was taking ages. So I said, just copy what you want onto the new drive, which was only about 3GB and I will run gparted on it, repartition, format it as 1 big usb stick.

I used gparted, deleted all partitions, created a new partition, formatted it NTFS.

There were several warnings about 'all data will be lost'.

However, some stuff from Windows survived all that!

I noticed when I plugged the old drive into my old laptop to copy over an old film. There were 2 folders from the old Win 7 which survived deleting the partitions and reformatting. I deleted them while the drive was plugged into my old laptop, which has Ubuntu 14.04. They seem to be gone now.

How can any file survive that?

I think there is a command like:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdbX

to zero everything, (not that she has any important secrets on the old drive).

Would that have got rid of these armour-plated folders?

Well, I suppose that the partitioning could have been interrupted.

Do you have a copy of a log that gparted made at the time of your format?

The partitioning was not interrupted. There were 5 partitions, including an old swap partition from when I tried to get the gf to use Linux. She never listens to me!

Maybe the log still exists, but it will be at home on my old laptop. I did not save the log, so I don't know if gparted still has it.

GPT???