time to erase

[joebib]

Forgive me if this has already been addressed, but if it is, I couldn't find it.

On my older PC (Dell with Pentium 4/XP home edition/Windows 5.1), the eraser scheduler says "running" for hours and never seems to finish, and yet on my new Gateway laptop (Centrino & Vista/Windows7), eraser only takes maybe 5 minutes to complete.

BTW, I have it set to the Pseudorandom 1-pass setting on both computers, and have eraser 5.8.8 on both (since the 6.0.6 kept crashing).

Is it normal to take so long?

Thanks in advance for any help.

 

[DavidHB]

The bottom line is that the wipe may have completed on your old machine, but definitely failed on the new one. Expect a free space wipe to take several hours, particularly on a larger hard drive.

Version 5.8.8 should be fine on the XP machine. Is the wipe not completing at all, even if you allow it to run, say, overnight?

Version 5 works for some people on Windows 7, but it is not a supported combination, as the security environment is so different to that of XP. I'd guess that you were trying to use the 'stable' build 1376 of Version 6; sadly, this build is anything but stable under Windows 7. I am currently using the most recent build (1884 at the time of writing) satisfactorily under both Windows 7 x64 and Vista x64. It is probably wise not to try to erase cluster tips on a free space wipe of a system drive, as that seems to produce a vast task log of mostly inevitable warnings, but everything else is working OK.

I think that Joel is planning a new release of Version 6 towards the end of this month. In the meantime, I'd say that the nightly builds are the best option under Windows 7.

Hope this helps.

David

 

[Joel]

To add on, use the 6.0 builds instead of the 6.2 ones, even if the 6.2 ones may have a higher build number, unless you really know what you're doing (i.e. opening up a can o' good ole' worms)