BUG: erase unused space with pseudorandom data

michael.habbe

New Member
Hello.

Until yesterday i enjoyed using eraser, v584 on WinXP SP3.

But now i stumbled about a very very strange thing:

I sold my brother-in-law a new Raid1-SAN from D-Link with 500 GB. So he gave me his 250 GB one-disk external hard-drive. His demand to me was to clean safely the harddisk (h:) before using or rather give it someone to use it. OK, no problem.

To make sure all data is gone i took photorec to restore some of his data before erasing empty space. I could restore some Word-/PDF-/txt-files and opened them. Some of this files i identified they were created by him.

The disk was empty so i erased unused space using pseudorandom data with 1-pass.

About 8 hours later i was running photorec again to see the result. The result was shocking: All of his data was gone, but some of my own files (saved on c: d: e:) were now being restored (from h:)! But i never stored any data on this harddisk! Pictures, Word, PDF, Txtfiles. I could recognize all of them as my own data. Some of this files i saved not long ago (1/2 year) and some other 5 years ago.

What happened?!?

Today (25.02.) i reproduced the bug.
I took an old harddisk (again h:) with 20 GB (its running faster through) and deleted all files with US/DOD 3-pass. It was an old Windows98-System. To control the environment i run photorec, which was undeleting trash and nothing from the old system.
After this i erased unused space with pseudorandom data. Again i run photorec, which restored system-files from my SIS-VGA which i located on my systemdisk: c:\windows\system32.

To confirm this i actually run PC Inspector File Recovery. This program found only trash.



Michael
 
5.84 is old. Could you install the latest 5.x version either the stable release: 5.86a or the Beta release: 5.8.7beta4. Both can be downloaded form the eraser website (http://eraser.heidi.ie/). I'd recommend staying away from the 6.x version for the moment it has some nasty bugs in it.

If this problem still persists feel free to follow up and I'm sure someone will try and help further.
 
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