Curious about Failure Report Log

R

Robb

New Member
Hi,

I've just used Eraser to erase the free space on my C: drive. (This time letting it run undisturbed until complete, and consequently not undergoing the trauma I wrote about in my last post. :) )

When it had finished, it produced a list of fails. The list was a massive 3481 lines long, and included a vast number of files that it had 'failed' to erase, some of which were appended '(Protected File)' A lot of the files that were listed were in C:\Program Files or C:\Windows or C:\System etc.

My query is this: If these are all files, surely they are not 'free space' anyway are they? I understood the two phrases to be mutually exclusive.(Or have I misunderstood what I'm talking about completely?)

In other words, I am curious why was Eraser even attempting to erase them in the first place?

Apologies in advance if the answer is glaringly obvious, and I'm just being dumb.
 
Not dumb at all.

To the best of my knowledge, Eraser attempts to find freespace in all files on a given computer, whether they're "in-use" or "locked" or not. (It doesn't differentiate based on what the files' purpose or use is, IOW).

When it can't get "in" to such a file, it produces a "fail" line. This can be minimized by shutting down all un-neccessary running processes, but not eliminated.

Is there a security/privacy hazard there? I kind of doubt it, but who really knows? If system files are locked then nothing extraneous is writing to them anyway (except perhaps the system), so the freespace contained therein shouldn't contain anything you'd need to worry about. (I think).

There is freespace within ALL files, due to the "cluster size" issue: http://kb.iu.edu/data/ahim.html

HTH Pete
 
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