So I've been avoiding Eraser's 'wipe free space' utility because of some of the complications I read about on their forums. I've been using Ccleaner now for about six months after being referred to it from bleepingcomputer.com forums.
So, of course I was delighted when I saw that they had added a 'wipe free space' feature to the latest version. I didn't try it out at first until I had seen a little feedback on the forums here (or at least until some documentation became available). Well, checking back today I see that the documentation is there and some user comments in the forums (all good) so I decided to give it a try, using CcleanerPortable on a Hitachi Travelstar 60GB 7200 RPM hard drive using AMD Athlon 64 3700+ processor, with 35.5GB of free space to wipe.
After hitting the 'Run Cleaner' button the wiping began and immediately the screen showed the amount of free space available and next to that the percentage finished with the count of filespace being wiped as it was occuring (counting up from zero towards 35.5GB), and the percentage finished moving along with that. That was it and I noticed that it was moving along pretty quickly. It took about twenty-five minutes for the counter to reach 35.5GB, then about another five minutes while (I presume) the overwrite was deleted. Then it was finished and I then ran Recuva (as someone had suggested here) in 'Deep scan' mode and found about seventeen thousand files with (I would estimate) about twenty percent of them 1kb files (with filenames) showing 'excellent' and in the green for recovery and all the same 'unrecoverable' files that were there (i.e. with filenames and 'size on disk') when I ran Recuva before the wipe. I picked eight files out and they 'recuva'd' just fine. There were also a lot of zero byte files showing with garbled names (presumably the files that were used to 'overwrite') but everything else was there, too, especially all of the filenames of 'unrecoverable' files.
Any suggestions?
Thanks
