Wiping Free Space Can’t Pass 32% Complete

[David Michael Fabian]

The process keeps running, but it is decelerating at a rate that looks like it will take eons to complete.  Furthermore, it only monotonically increases its estimated time remaining, which indicates it will never complete.

 I am using “CCleaner Professional v5.88.9346 (64-bit)” on a one-TB HDD.

[nukecad]

It can take a long time to wipe free space on a 1TB drive.

It's a consequence of todays bigger drives, anything that needs to read or write the whole drive is going to take longer because there is more to do.
eg. Consolidation defragmenting, chkdsk, some virus scans, etc.

Especially if it's an external drive connected by USB, and especially if you are using Drive Wiper to wipe the entire drive which will delete any data on it and then wipe it.
(You can't do an entire wipe on your system drive, for obvious reasons).

I always ignore the estimated time remaining, or percentage completed, in any app and even Windows Updates.
It's usually wildly out and you often see them suddenly drop from hours remaining to completed.

A relevant question is how many wipe passes have you specified?
1-pass is sufficent, more than one is not needed and just takes longer, ie. if you specify 35 passes then it's going to take 35 times longer than one pass.
(The multi-pass options are not needed these days, they are just still there for the paranoid who ask for them back if they are removed).

 

[David Michael Fabian]

Well, I just killed the process.  After running 12 hours, it reached 49% but then dropped back to 0% to start all over!

I am now in the market for a less buggy product.

 

[Dave CCleaner]

17 minutes ago, David Michael Fabian said:

After running 12 hours, it reached 49% but then dropped back to 0% to start all over!

Wipe Free Space has been operating without issue for millions of users for several years (although it can take a while on large drives if you have selected the multiple-pass options).  What you describe though sounds like a potential HDD issue.  Have you tried a chkdsk as suggested?

[David Michael Fabian]

I specified only one pass and I had already run CHKDSK (which found no problems).

[Guest MeganCCleaner]

Hi @David Michael Fabian Our support team would be happy to investigate further and you can easily contact them via email, using support@ccleaner.com.

[Andavari]

On 25/12/2021 at 19:58, Dave CCleaner said:

Wipe Free Space has been operating without issue for millions of users for several years (although it can take a while on large drives if you have selected the multiple-pass options).  What you describe though sounds like a potential HDD issue.  Have you tried a chkdsk as suggested?

If it's by any chance an "Eco" drive some of those from my personal experience are very slow and performing certain maintenance tasks such as defragmentation, wiping free space, etc., on 1TB class drives or bigger can take over 24 hours to complete -- whereas they can seem perfectly normal speed-wise when only reading+writing to them.

On that particular drive what I'd do:
1. Run via an admin Command Prompt or admin PowerShell: ChkDsk /R
Note: This can also be ran from 'Advanced Startup > Command Prompt' if it's the system drive in order to successfully scan it outside of Windows so that you can actually see what it details once it completes versus just having it run on reboot.
Microsoft's instructions on how to use ChkDsk.
2. Use a utility that will do a S.M.A.R.T self-test Extended scan of the drive. There are good free tools to do it such as GSmartControl and PassMark DiskCheckup

[David Michael Fabian]

Sorry CCleaner!  I was wrong!  Drive Wiper worked!