erasing unused disc space won't complete
- Thread starter moonpie
- Start date
Hi,
I'm facing a similar problem. Erasing unused space has been running for almost a week now. The HDD is 120GB total, and there was about 100GB free space I think. When I click on the task, the Erasure Progress dialog says it's at 87.97% and the current item is "Old resident file system table files", and it's been showing this for 6 days now. The HDD seems to be busy. I'm running Eraser 6.0.8 on a Win XP SP3. The default unused space erasure method is set to "Pseudorandom Data (1 pass)". I know erasing unused space can take days, but is it to be expected for just 100 GB and doesn't the 87.97% status look suspicious?
Thanks in advance!
I'm facing a similar problem. Erasing unused space has been running for almost a week now. The HDD is 120GB total, and there was about 100GB free space I think. When I click on the task, the Erasure Progress dialog says it's at 87.97% and the current item is "Old resident file system table files", and it's been showing this for 6 days now. The HDD seems to be busy. I'm running Eraser 6.0.8 on a Win XP SP3. The default unused space erasure method is set to "Pseudorandom Data (1 pass)". I know erasing unused space can take days, but is it to be expected for just 100 GB and doesn't the 87.97% status look suspicious?
Thanks in advance!
Joel
Active Member
The old file system resident files cleaning can take a very, very long time if the drive has been formatted a long time ago.
Windows adds entries to the MFT as it requires, and the MFT tends to get very fragmented with time. Fragmented MFTs will take a very long time to clean. I've got a patch that will reduce severity of this problem, but I do not think that 6.0 will get the patch as it changes the behaviour of file erasures.
So in the meantime, you should let it run to completion (even if it does take a few days). It would only be a cause for worry if Eraser has the progress remaining the same AND that your hard disk is sitting idle.
Windows adds entries to the MFT as it requires, and the MFT tends to get very fragmented with time. Fragmented MFTs will take a very long time to clean. I've got a patch that will reduce severity of this problem, but I do not think that 6.0 will get the patch as it changes the behaviour of file erasures.
So in the meantime, you should let it run to completion (even if it does take a few days). It would only be a cause for worry if Eraser has the progress remaining the same AND that your hard disk is sitting idle.