Eraser 6 stable has been released after being for 2 years in development. Eraser 6 sports a completely revamped user interface, and Windows XP/Vista/7 support out of the box. Eraser 6 now allows users to use the context menu in Windows Explorer to erase Unused Space on drives with UAC on under Windows Vista and 7. The On-Demand and Scheduler panes in Eraser 5 has been replaced with the integrated Task Scheduler in Eraser 6 which allows for simplified management of tasks. The biggest and most significant change since rc5 is the addition of FAT directory cleaning and various usability improvements.

Changelog

Revision	Description	Author
1130	Progress dialog improvements	Joel
1131	Deal with cluster tip erasure failures more robustly When a user does a folder erasure, delete all empty subfolders of the target if they are empty after the erase regardless of whether the folder should be deleted when empty	Joel
1132	Fixed the crash which appears after Erase has been running for a while	Joel
1133	Create a Hide button for the progress dialog Relabelled tab order for the progress dialog	Joel
1136	Friendlier error message used when access is denied erasing a file cluster tip.	Joel
1137	Moved the task list to a file in the Local Application Data folder (%LOCALAPPDATA%\Eraser 6)	Joel
1138	Allow users to filter log messages by severity	Joel
1139	Fixed crash when "unformatted" drives are installed on the computer. Thanks to Xanashi for reporting the bug.	Joel
1140, 1145	Clean up files meant for cleaning up the MFT after we are done with it. Thanks to mcmaster76 for reporting the bug.	Joel
1143, 1147	Log viewer performance optimisations	Joel
1144	Specify the minimum size of the log viewer so that the dialog will remain useable.	Joel
1148	Fixed a crash when right-clicking a drive in the Computer folder. Thanks to mcmaster76 for reporting the bug.	Joel
1154	Fixed restart-run tasks.	Joel
1158	Made the forced closure of file handles optional	Joel
1159	Added first draft of the Eraser documentation	Joel
1163, 1164	Allow eraser to be called from the Run dialog	Joel
1165, 1166	Created a new type of task - Manual tasks which run only on demand. The distinction between manual and run-once tasks are that tasks meant to run only once will be run and if it completes successfully the task will be deleted. Manually run tasks will never be automatically deleted.	Joel
1185	Fixed crash when erasing FAT file systems.	Joel
1186	Certain file names which could not be erased from the context menu previously can now be erased.	Joel
1187	Allow computers without network adapters to run Eraser	Joel
1188	Disk performance counters can now be used as an entropy source	Joel
1193	Cleaner NTFS MFT erasure.	Joel
1195	When deleting folders reset all the access modified and creation times.	Joel
1206, 1207, 1211, 1214, 1215, 1219-1222, 1225-1236, 1239, 1242	Implemented FAT cleaning	Joel
1243	Implemented delete key in the Scheduler. Thanks to Xanashi for suggesting!	Joel
1247	Updated the Visual C++ runtime to the latest one (2008SP1 with ATL security fix) This fixes hangs when using the Eraser context menu.	Joel
1278	Installer bootstrapper improvements	Joel
1285	Do not stop running a task if one target does not exist.	Joel
1287, 1288	NTFS MFT Cleaning improvements.	Joel
1296	Allow many files to be dragged into the Eraser Window.	Joel
1297	Erase MFT resident files before expanding the file to clear the cluster. This makes sure MFT resident files do not move around the MFT.	Joel
1299	When selecting too many files to erase from the Eraser context menu in Windows Explorer display a helpful error message instead of failing without any reason.	Joel
1304	Fixed Eraser being unable to exit when started at logon.	Joel
1317	Allow an elevated instance of Eraser to be controlled remotely by the same user. This allows the user to use the context menu extension even when Eraser is running as an Administrator.	Joel
1318	Fixed crash when deleting multiple tasks	Joel
1320	Added Italian localisation support	Joel
1321	Compile Warning fixes	Joel
1323	Don't check the SFC filelist if the given path name is longer than 255 characters	Joel
1324-1341	Implemented Italian localisation	Andrea
1342, 1348, 1350	Fixed build process for developers without code signing certificates	Joel
1343	Rearranged the Italian settings panel to fit longer strings	Joel
1344-1347	More Italian localisation work	Andrea
1353	Display the language name in the .NET framework language for all Eraser translations for uniformity	Joel
1354	Display untranslated strings in debug builds as "untranslated" but use the English string in release builds	Joel
1355	Fixed updater crash	Joel
1365-1368, 1373	More Italian localisation work; added support for Shell Extension translations	Andrea
1369-1372	Implemented Shell Extension translation switching (controlled from the Eraser Settings page)	Joel

Retirement of Eraser 5

This release of Eraser brings about sad news for some - Eraser 5 support will end after the release of Eraser 6.0.7. Technically, since this Eraser build is the 6th release of the version 6 this is Eraser 6.0.6. Thus, the next release of Eraser will see the end of Eraser 5 support. This is mainly to ensure that critical bugs within Eraser 6 are fixed before Eraser 5 is retired.

The reason for not supporting the old code is that the old code was not designed to run on the operating systems of today and functions do not work as expected. Eraser 6 was redesigned to ensure that it will match the coding standards and fit into the software ecosystem like any other "modern" application.

Download/Hashes

Download Eraser 6 from SourceForge

• MD5: fb7e0c9fe972d840f440b927ead1c181
• SHA-1: 226ba6e58773fd5c1350dd8cc3c3cbe1f44bfa49
• RIPEMD-160: 5d13acbcdbc1a2b898f80f4e1f0752f5e1590964
• SHA-256: 8f449759c1082d49f80517ef8462e0e71b69af711dfc63d80fc48ff98
23881e7
• SHA-512: 40d9b1233302dd54cda1103aefaffd6e0afd5ff99fe54459e45343c02
058c08dfd4d42069547d85282387df43dcd72da36c72d6f410fe4957c
8ef5595a3e267f
• Whirlpool: f375ec1ff8c9a6010b00dcd0fa36e5957f9dcf6261f5ff0a3b0cae387
7ec794ef5f6280ec71f30bb689cd1202d1060201ec51a7998fd35a712
338cb23833166a

Eraser 5.8.8 is released. This release is mainly meant to fix the disk corruption which results from running a first/last 2KB erase on a sparse file as well as to fix the context menu causing Explorer to hang when installed with certain software which also inserts a context menu item.

Do note that the Eraser 5.x series will be retired (i.e. unmaintained) after the release of Eraser 6.0.7. See complete details in the Eraser 6 announcement.

Changelog

Revision	Description	Author
1149	Do not erase sparse, compressed or encrypted files when FL2KB erasure is selected to prevent disk corruption.	Joel
1150	Fix Win32 Eraser builds to be truly Unicode builds.	Joel
1169	A few 64-bit fixes.	Joel
1168	Ensure that Eraser uses the latest runtimes packaged with the installer. This should fix hangs when using the Context menu.	Joel
1184	Fixed the About dialog after migrating to Unicode	Joel
1279	Sign all binaries packaged with the installer	Joel
1292	Allow erasing UNC paths	Joel
1293	Fixed memory exhaustion when doing a free space erase for FAT drives	Joel
1294	Migrate non-Unicode custom erasure methods to the Unicode methods so that old custom erasure methods are preserved upon upgrade	Joel
1305	Ensure that Eraser is not running when the Eraser setup is run	Joel

Download/Hashes

Update: The previously uploaded version packaged an incorrect C++ runtime version. The new version with the correct runtime has been re-released on 16th December 2009 at 8.20PM +800GMT and the file hashes are updated below. The standalone version is unaffected. In addition, the standalone involved a corrupted Licence.txt and a new copy has been uploaded

• Eraser 5.8.8 Installer
• MD5: 9d84e8184413495257abeeba44cccd81
• SHA-1: c83260be472af4cdf18a31de293f9b0cd1494548
• RIPEMD-160: 772f72acfd807407ba36bc275a40fcd0684f3022
• SHA-256: a03578a6b28aff267f20a87755696a91a1d5b923e815b2989e4afcc89
15cc357
• SHA-512: 12f3a76886d8217d47d51926247ec12a58d1ff66a7d76f0496297850a
171d5f22be89cf421d6d63c3f01ae9fc30e31857fa5b344bbcc783e1c
2b5e83a7e052cb
• Whirlpool: 997962f5a454f3a8e1c439569b90170eaf8c824a2e6a63c594290d57f
5947cb013e9215ed7bf58c695f898e63f6f3a6e3b6aad17ca452d1f8c
9afc6c40509eb1
• Eraser 5.8.8 Portable
• MD5: 28de51839323c419cb2523398a4421de
• SHA-1: f14f820cf7345d013d0c6a781088bb16d09df582
• RIPEMD-160: 2776e28da1d377abd0aabb88cdedfe6ab3c9cf9e
• SHA-256: 4253e5cb73e29e75c0c4bff006f45f554ebd7846c86e83e93b2e059c7
f34b03f
• SHA-512: 554a8375e3c94176cb174d8db66521a93beb5ee52a302300b9f86dbc3
5cba87785cb0143885fd38f765b786de9a52fef3f482c42e6da30df75
672acd9dafe529
• Whirlpool: af04f01d0da1441fc0ebd0f301833cef4e98b01ae310e2ed9b3d3fb75
263e9da8ddf1e5f3d1f9fd0366c5b13da5c49178d6c0b039a252613e9
b100892d30d0fd