Drive Wiper

Does Drive Wiper clean up the drive or does it remove windows

Cleans only free space if correct option is chosen (look on top of page).

It will never 'remove Windows' as it runs under Windows. It can, however, wipe a non-system drive completely whatever it previously contained.

Thanks for the replies..I have to investigate this more...I understood if you wipe free space.. then that made all the deleted files unrecoverable...so I ran a free space wipe on my drive...when it finished I ran Recuva.. hundreds of files came up and all were recoverable...so I had to overwrite them with Recuva ..and this made them unrecoverable.. so what good was it running the wipe in the first place...thanks in advance

When you use wipe free space in CC it overwrites any previously deleted files so they are not recoverable - BUT

Windows keeps a list of all the files that have ever been there. This list is not overwritten by CC.

So Recuva, or any other recovery programme, can still see that list and report that the files are potentially 'recoverable'.

If you actually try to recover them then they can't be recovered, because they have been overwritten. Only a list of their names is there.

A crude analogy, but think of it like having a cabinet full of paper files, with the contents list written in permanent marker on the cabinet.

You can throw away all the files and then put blank paper in there, ('wipe free space'), but the list is still there on the cabinet until you scrub it off.


Someone (recuva) can come along and read the contents list, but if they try to read any of the files listed they'll just find blank paper.

Thanks NUKECAD...now it makes sense