Disk Drill finds erased files

M

mfa

New Member
Hi everyone,

Honestly, I am a bit puzzled.

I have a HDD of which I am trying to erase unused space. I have used Eraser for this with both 1 pass and 3 passes. However, when I use Disk Drill to check the there are any recoverable files, it finds ALOT of files. As an example it finds 12.000 jpg pictures. And yes, it is not just small temporary files, but actual pictures that i can preview and recover! This is disturbing to me....

It should be mentioned that I have also tried to use CCleaner and BCWipe to clear the unused space, but still Disk Drill finds the files. If i use Recuva to recover files, it finds 0 files. Therefore im in doubt what is going on. Is Disk Drill showing files that are not deleted? Do the different tools not have common understanding of what deleted files are?

Im runnning a PC with windows 10 Home and eraser 6.2.0.2990. The HDD is a 500 GB NTFS drive.

I also have SSD drives where i want to do the same, but lets start with the HDD.

Any ideas why I can still recover these files??
 
Try these steps
Shutdown all unessary services - AV etc
Empty your recyclebin
Run a freespace erase

Now try recovering the files, if a file is still recovered is it intact?
Do you have any third party data protection software running? shadow copies or RAID?
What happens if you erase a single file?
 
I have similar issues. I'm using Eraser 6.2.02996. Here was my wiping methodology for Windows 10 Pro and 11 Pro:

- I delete shadow copies from "create a restore point"
- I perform windows reset and let it re-install (admittedly, I did not select the "clean drive" option when resetting from windows recovery inside the running OS. I do this thinking that this should cause the entire physical drive to become free/unallocated/unused space that will be seen by the next OS install when I re-install windows.)
- I set windows back up
- I then install Eraser 6.2.02996, make sure that my PC was set to not turn off the screen or go to sleep ever, and run the US DoD 5220.22-M 3 pass method on "unused disk space" on C drive and let it run and hope that it stays up the next morning and shows that it finished with warnings. (I actually also started using Eraser 6.2.02993 because I was having too many app closures with the current Eraser version when I would be having Eraser run for hours and let it run and in the morning come back to some computers showing that the Eraser program is not open anymore, and I can't find an event log in event viewer to show that something had happened. Though, this started happening in 6.2.02993 as well. But I would perform the wipe again, and then it would stay up and show that it had finished, with warnings.)
-After it finishes, I then perform another Windows reset (again without choosing the "Clean Drive" option, so that it would be faster and I figured that when Windows re-installed after the second wipe that the only data that would be left would be just the OS files from the previous Windows install since Eraser should have erased all the unused disk space from the original wipe.)
- I then set the computer back up one more time and used PhotoRec to check to see if I could recover any files, and it showed a lot of files that I could recover and open, and they looked to be complete files.

I'm trying to wipe a lot of computers in order to sell. I may have to pull the hard drives and destroy them, but wanted to try to perform wipes with Eraser so that we could "relatively" safely give them to other people to use for home PCs without former data being able to be recovered.

Furthermore, I will admit that I am a newbie with Open Source, and I wanted to help contribute even though I'm not currently at a level of expertise to be able to currently contribute code. Thank you for all your hard work with this project! :)
 
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