CCleaner's drive wipe option.. Not working..

Well folks, I have a 128GB laptop HDD running with winXP. Single user, single partition. It is about 70% full, more or less.

I use CCleaner extensively for other things and it works great there. So I thought I'd up the ante and try out the disk wipe feature. I ran it and cleared the $mft and wiped the free space.

It took about 1/2 hour more or less. I then ran Recuva and was able to still see 20,000+ files dating back to 2007 or so. I recovered some of the more recent ones that I used just last week with an issue.

So just what does the Drive Wiper do? It obviously didn't do what it implies.

Either Recuva is beyond belief or CCleaner Drive Wipe is faulty. Which is it?

Instead of running Drive wiper, I use Wipe Free Space and it thoroughly cleans -- cannot recover any files.

My settings 2enbaeb.png

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and then 245iyl4.png

I'll check that out and see what happens.

They perform the same functions for the Windows system drive only though.

Be very careful using the Drive Wiper as it is what the name implies however you can't wipe the system disk Windows is installed on, however if you make the mistake with say for instance a USB Thumb Drive or portable hard disk you won't get a Wipe Free Space but instead lose everything on the drive.

As for Recuva seeing left-over files that can't be wiped you could try to secure delete them using Recuva, it will then either successfully delete them or tell you in the report afterwards that they can't be deleted since if they're located in the MFT.

They perform the same functions for the Windows system drive only though.

Be very careful using the Drive Wiper as it is what the name implies however you can't wipe the system disk Windows is installed on, however if you make the mistake with say for instance a USB Thumb Drive or portable hard disk you won't get a Wipe Free Space but instead lose everything on the drive.

As for Recuva seeing left-over files that can't be wiped you could try to secure delete them using Recuva, it will then either successfully delete them or tell you in the report afterwards that they can't be deleted since if they're located in the MFT.

Good information here and in the previous post. I can unplug my usb stuff. I'll experiment around more. I have proven and tested backups from the other day, backups that actually work, so, if I screw up something I can go back without a hassle.

I'm also wondering if something (like a crashed explorer process) didn't unlock files that CCleaner needed to delete, like some of those hidden recycle bin logs. I had been running this iteration of windows for about a week or so with a lot of changes going on to install/uninstall. So a fresh reboot was in order. I also had the "Scan for non-deleted file (for recovery from damaged or reformatted disks) option in Recuva checked. So with just a bit of inspection of the tens of thousands of files I quickly found out that they are my working data sets! How funny is that? :lol: :lol: Trying to recover data that is already present and in working form!

I'm almost done with the $mft wipe and free space wipe.

I'll run Recuva and see what's left over.

Ok, This is more like it! Now Recuva sees thousands of Zzz.z.zz.zzzz.z files. That and a few red marks by some blank entries and a few 0-length files.

Those zzzzzz files are those which were successfully wiped/secure deleted.