C Cleaner not wiping free space.

[Phil66]

Hello folks,

I'm selling my old laptop on the bay and I want' to wipe the free space of the C:. I've tried a couple of times but Recuva deep scan always finds almost 200,00 recoverable files. I used it on the D: partition and it wiped that fine.

Any ideas?

Thanks

[Augeas]

There could be several reasons for this.

Recuva deep scan runs a normal scan first, so you will see all the deleted file names presented from the MFT. If you have used the 'native' WFS then the file names will be there in their original form. If you have used Drive Wiper then the same number of file names will be there but the names will be in a variable ZZZZ.ZZZ form. In both cases the file data will have gone. You might also have the Show Non-Deleted Files option checked in which case you will see a very large number of live files listed. All these files are 'recoverable', but the wiped ones should return zeroes.

If the files found are from the deep scan (their names are [000123].ext or similar) then there are some circumstances where a WFS fails to completely wipe the device. Are the deep scan files all relatively small, say 20k or so or less?

I should check the files with names in  the Header pane of Recuva to see if they contain zeroes. If so all is fine. You could select all deep scan files and run a single pass secure delete. This will clear those files from the device.