Super Fast Posted January 30, 2011 Share Posted January 30, 2011 I have an external drive connected that CCleaner seems to take forever to start the wipe process. I moved all the data off the drive, then I selected to erase the entire drive. Not sure why it will take several minutes to do this, since I have a high speed machine running 2 GB RAM under XP Pro SP2 with a dual core 3.2 GHZ processor (6.4 GHZ) & most of the ram is free. I know the machine is free from malware, viruses, etc, so why is this drive taking so long? The drive is connected externally via USB 2, & is in very good condition (high speed copy works fine). There doesn't appear to be any bad sectors etc... P.S. Wipe drive starts fine & processes immediately when I select just wipe free space, but when I select wipe entire drive is when it takes so long. It is a 500 GB 7,200 RPM drive. Edit: It is more than several minutes. I have now been waiting for it to begin for the past 25 min. It still says Formatting E:\ Edit # 2: Both drives are IDE (PATA) based drives. And now, I have a 2cd drive, also 7,200 RPM wherein CCleaner is hung on Formatting... This 2cd drive is 160 GB. Must be a bug, since both drives are perfectly healthy, both drives have been freshly formatted in Windows before beginning, there are no processes locking the drives save for CCleaner itself, etc... P.P.S. If by chance CCleaner is invoking the LONG format command, it really should invoke the quick format command instead. There are too many 2TB drives, & drives that would take forever to format if it invokes long format command. Additionally, if that is what CCleaner is doing, it gives no progress indicator of the activity, thereby nullifying the awesome piece of software that CCleaner is. If CCleaner is using long, simply switch it to short instead, and let it clear the whole entire drive. However, I suspect that CCleaner is not utilizing the long format, so I wonder what is wrong? Why is the erase everything taking so long on multiple drives? I rebooted just to be sure, & all drives are connected just 1 drive at the time. Hope this is fixed by either 2.04 or the 2.05 release, because I love CCleaner! -------------> I just tried a 5,400 RPM Seagate 40 GB IDE drive connected via external USB 2, & wipe entire drive command took around 5 min to start processing the drive. Most of the time spent on "Formatting drive". Windows can do a quick format in 5 or 10 seconds. Isn't 5 min, & 35 to 50 min entirely too long for CCleaner to process a drive in the "formatting" stage? Seems that the larger the drive, the longer the wipe entire drive option takes, while wipe free space only will start in 1 second or less. If this is CCleaner gathering MFT records to process, then it should provide a user with the progress of the activity, so they are aware of why it is taking so long. MFT with high numbers of files may possibly slow it down. Not sure if that is it, but sure would like to know the cause! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Posted January 30, 2011 Share Posted January 30, 2011 How many passes are you using? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Super Fast Posted January 31, 2011 Author Share Posted January 31, 2011 How many passes are you using? I tried with 1, I tried with 3, & the result would be the same. It would work fine & start immediately upon doing just an Erase free space, even though it was already freshly formatted via windows format in NTFS format. When I would try the Erase Entire drive, I noted that it would take a loooooong time to begin erasing the space. Puzzling to me! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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