Data appears erased but File names remain

S

squatuae

New Member
I have performed the erase using the DoD and Guttman 35 methods. To check the effectiveness of the erasure I loaded DiskInternals Uneraser to see if the data could be brought up again. The data seems to be scrambled or deleted as it's supposed to be but the file names remain. Is it not possible to delete ALL data including the file names? Sometimes the file names themselves could include information that needs to be deleted.

After discovering this I now change the file name to random wording before erasure to help with the masking. Thanks for the help.
 
Was this a file erase or a free space erase? And had the files whose names remained been deleted or erased?

Eraser does normally remove (or rather overwrite) the MFT entries of files it erases. But the NTFS file system is a complex beast, and there are areas of the file system to which Eraser (or any other program) has no access. Joel in particular is now pretty good at diagnosing individual cases, but we need to know the exact sequence of events before we can work out what has happened in a particular instance.

Another user has suggested that, in addition to the free space erase, there should be an option to clear only the unused entries in the MFT. I had my doubts about this suggestion at first, but I can now see that it could be quite useful.

David
 
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