Physical Drive Vs. C:

P

Piercethedrk

New Member
Hello, gents.
I downloaded eraser recently because my mother fell in with a west african scammer on a dating site. Unfortunately, she used my computer. Needless to say, the last thing I need is identity theft.
Anyway, I tried a bunch of these things and Eraser seems to be the only one that actually seems to work without deleting everything on the drive including the operating system. I ran Eraser for the free space on the C drive and then ran a scan to see if there was anything recoverable. It worked. The C drive was overwritten. However, there is also a physical drive which is listed as 0 physical and does not have a letter assigned. It had lots of files still on it. I'm not sure how to run eraser to shred the free space on the "physical drive". My OP is windows XP. Any suggestions?
Thanks.
 
Hi :)

I am guessing that you only have one hard drive installed and you are using some sort of recovery software. C and physical drive 0 are the same drive. The other files you see may be in the host protected area (which are files you want to keep).

CCleaner is probably more suited to cleaning histories, MRU and such like. Eraser only overwrites already deleted data.
 
That may be a false positive reported by the recovery software.

Why not try to recover something and see what it is ? I would be interested to know what you find.
 
Overwriter... do your research PROPERLY. :)

C: need not be physical drive 0. In computers everything is started from 0; this isn't any different for drives. Your first drive connected to the mobo is drive 0, second is drive 1... and it goes on. The second thing which is of concern is partitioning. Likewise, in the simple case partitions are created and assigned ID's starting from 0.

Therefore you can identify partitions on drives by the drive ID and partition ID.

Most of the time C: is on drive 0, partition 0. HOWEVER this is not always the case (my C: is on drive 1 partition 0, linux is on drive 1 partition 3, linux swap is on drive 1 partition 4... you get the picture.)

So, this "physical" disk may be on your computer but it is unaccessible until a drive letter or mount point is assigned to it. If you really want to erase it, right click my computer > Manage. Go to disk management, right click on the "physical drive"'s space and click change drive letter and paths:
diskmanagement.png


Click Add on the dialog which appears, and give it a Drive letter.

Restart eraser. The drive should appear.

Joel
 
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