Wiped free disk space on HDD, now the drive is inaccessible.

[FedUp]

I used CCleaner's Wipe Free Space option on my HDD, and now Windows tells me it can't access the drive.

This was a huge HDD, lots of files and info I don't want to lose.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

[Andavari]

Interesting that it caused the drive file system to become RAW.

You can use a 3rd disk partition tool that can convert RAW to NTFS - don't know if it's a free feature in them or not though:
https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=convert+RAW+to+NTFS

Edit:
Note that you may need to use a recovery tool first just in case the converting causes file loss.

[trium]

what is with the disk management?

can you right-click on the raw-drive?

properties -> tools -> errorchecking (or how it named in english)

Quote

This option checks the drive for file system errors.

can this work?

[Andavari]

No Trium that won't work. Back in the WinXP era it was extremely easy to fix by booting into Recovery Console, nowadays with Win10 I believe a 3rd party partition recovery tool has to be used.

[hazelnut]

So is any Windows  installed on F drive or is it just data?

[Guest Stephen CCleaner]

Hi all,

I wanted to confirm back that we took this report very seriously and disabled the feature in v5.78 while we completed a thorough investigation of the Wipe Free Space feature. We thoroughly retested the functionality across various stress conditions, and did not find anything that could cause the error described.

Wipe Free Space uses only standard file manipulating operations for creating and writing files, not direct disk access (which could introduce risk for file system integrity), so we feel confident that this is most likely down to hardware failure or some other rogue element that is beyond our control.