Erasure of unused space

[Bee]

I ran an unused space erasure last night and this morning noticed that it had completed with errors. Most of the errors were about cluster tips not being erased for some reason, system files and files that were in use by another process. Anyway, I have the suspicion that I've lost free space. I'm not totally sure though since I didn't check how much free space I had before I used Eraser. I've looked through the root of my drive for random looking folders and found nothing. Is there a way of checking if some of eraser's pseudorandom data is still on the drive? Will running eraser a second time catch these files or will it not see them as free space anymore and leave them alone?
I'm using windows 7 pro 32-bit and ran eraser with administrator privilages.

 

[DavidHB]

Basically, if all you got was 'error' messages about cluster tips (and lots of them if you were erasing free space on Drive C, that is normal. Please see the FAQ posts on getting to know Eraser 6 and common Eraser problems for more details.

Future versions of Eraser will flag up very many fewer of these 'errors', which are not really errors at all, because the OS and the file system completely deny access to many tens of thousands of system files. This is, in practice, not really a problem.

If the log file indicates that the free space erase was completed, it is unlikely that there will be undeleted Eraser files on your drive. The FAQ posts I referred to above tell you how to look for undeleted Eraser-generated files and folders. Just delete them to recover the free space. If this happens to you, I suggest that you try a recent 6.1 development build; these deal rather better with Windows' propensity to shut down Eraser when disk space gets low (as it has to during a free space erase).

David