Not Erasing Free Space on Hard Drive 'C'

[lovepinkxo]

Unfortunately, I had deleted info (that I now would like to delete permanently) out of my recycle bin, I have read that in order to permanently delete this, you must delete all of the free space on your hard drive.

I tried this about 3 times.. (I have Eraser 5.8.7) and I even tried running this as the administrator.

No progress is made (in the 'pass' or 'total' bars) and when I stop the process, it lists about 37 errors in the failures. However, I see different things in the 'item' line.

Will my deleted files never permanently delete?

Is this because there is too much unused space on my hard drive? Right now I have 42.5 GB free out of 73.0 GB.

Is my computer doomed, or does this take a lot of time?

Any suggestions or tips or ANYTHING would be GREAT.

Thanks all

 

[Joel]

well, yes you need to run Eraser as an administrator to use the free space erasure function. How far into the erase are you cancelling the process? Free space erasures usually take the order of hours to complete (40gb should take about 1/2 an hour or so with one pass - multiply the time by the number of passes you've selected and this excludes cluster tip erasure time which is proportionate to the number of files present on the disk)

And yes, if you let the process complete you will get rid of your data permanently (but if it's really important that it's irrecoverable, nothing beats incinerating the drive and getting a new one )

Joel