CCleaner Drive Wipe lets me only do 1 Pass

[COROVICD]

I just bought and installed CCleaner Professional Plus with the whole suite: PRO CCleaner, Recuva, Defraggler & Speccy, for up to 3 PCs CCleaner Pro

I read the Help on the web site, so I am aware of all the wiping options.

When in CCleaner I go to > Tools > Drive Wiper I can see my C hard drive. Unfortunately, hard drive is erroneously marked as SSD drive. If I chose "1 pass" wiping I can do the wipe. But if I choose "7 passes" or "35 passes" wipes my C drive becomes unselectable and I can not perform "7 passes" wipe.

How do I correct this problem and "force" CCleaner to do "7 passes" wipe?

For example, how do I tell to CCleaner that my drive is not SSD but a hard drive?

[Augeas]

CC saying an HDD as an SSD is an error. I don't know how CC identifies a drive, whether it interprets the model type or uses some other method, but sometimes it goes awry.

However (and many others will tell you this) you don't need to do multiple passes on an HDD overwrite, one will do. No commercial organisation in the world claims it can recover once-overwritten data, and if you're worried that MI5 might be bashing in your door then I respectfully advise you to surrender to the authorities.

[COROVICD]

52 minutes ago, Augeas said:

CC saying an HDD as an SSD is an error. I don't know how CC identifies a drive, whether it interprets the model type or uses some other method, but sometimes it goes awry.

However (and many others will tell you this) you don't need to do multiple passes on an HDD overwrite, one will do. No commercial organisation in the world claims it can recover once-overwritten data, and if you're worried that MI5 might be bashing in your door then I respectfully advise you to surrender to the authorities.

Thanks!

So there is no way to select the provided "7 passes" drive wipe? I wander why is the option there, when one is not able to select it?

Have you personally verified that all the deleted files are filled with zeros?

Edited October 23, 2020 by COROVICD

[Andavari]

47 minutes ago, COROVICD said:

So there is no way to select the provided "7 passes" drive wipe? I wander why is the option there, when one is not able to select it?

There's no way to change it because it's incorrectly detecting your drive as an SSD, it's a "protection scheme" so people don't kill their SSDs with unnecessary writes. It's something they'll have to fix in all of their software because even Defraggler will sometimes detect a drive incorrectly. The option is there for hard disk drives only, but it would have to correctly detect that you indeed have a hard disk drive.

This is a long shot however one thing to try, and I haven't the slightest clue if it will even work is to:
1. Uninstall CCleaner.
2. Restart Windows.
3. Reinstall CCleaner, and also input your license key info. Then see if it detects the drive correctly.
Only reason I even suggest this is because someone stated long ago uninstalling and reinstalling Defraggler fixed it for them, and sometimes when a new version is released and installed/updated it may mysteriously self-correct the issue.

I personally think it's a combination problem of both CCleaner and Windows (particularly Windows 10), because even Windows can guess the disk type incorrectly in some circumstances.

[nukecad]

The options for multiple passes will be greyed out because it's seeing the drive as an SSD and more than one pass could be damaging to the lifetime of the SDD.
I can still select multiple passes here for my HDDs.

Think of it a bit like washing clothes multiple times; a cotton shirt would be fine with that but a silk shirt would get damaged if you washed it too often.

As Augeas says one pass is more than sufficent to wipe a drive anyway, SDD or HDD, multiple passes are just overkill and a waste of your time.
(Like washing a shirt multiple times would be a wase of time).

And the next question is usually 'So why does CCleaner have the option for multiple passes?" and the answer is that it's simply a legacy thing from the days of old drives when multiple passes may have been of benefit. (And because some people still want the option because they don't understand that multiple passes are unneccessary these days).

[COROVICD]

Hey guys, thanks a  lot for the help!

[Aaron0x42]

nukecad, your answer is incorrect.  These are NOT SSDs, they are external USB spinning drives (in most cases).  You can hear them make hard drive noises when you are accessing them.  The one I'm trying to wipe right now is 10TB, that's NOT an SSD for only $200.  Western Digital MyBooks for example.  /r/DataHoarders shuck these for the spinning drives.  The first result when I googled this problem was from 2015, so this has been a problem with CCleaner for at-least 5 years.

A bug is a bug, regardless of whether one pass is "sufficient" or not, 

[nukecad]

@Aaron0x42

Nothing in my reply is incorrect. (Not even the comment about cotton vs silk shirts).

Why you think that a reply to the original poster about his drive being seen as a SDD and so some options being greyed out has anything whatsoever to do with your  hard drive is baffling?

You don't even say if you are having an issue or not, so all I will note is that wiping free space on a 10TB hard drive is going to take a long time.