Erase folders and files on my old computer

H

henrybsmith

New Member
I wish to erase all the files and folders, except the OS and applications. When I select drive D, my backup drive, to erase the program goes on for hours and in the end does nothing.
Tried erasing individual folders on my drive D, Nothing happens. I get errors and no eraser.

What am I doing wrong?

Looking forward to your reply.
 
Which version are you using?
 
henrybsmith said:
I am using Eraser 6.0.6.1376
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You are probably using build 1376 because it is bulled as the 'stable' version; sadly, that is something of a misnomer. Please try a recent nightly build; these come (quite reasonably) without guarantees, but I am currently running build 1884 (things have moved on!) with, so far, no problems. I'm doing beta test work, and am testing the erasing with Recuva.

I'd advise you to uninstall build 1376 fully before you install a later build. If you still get problems, please come back; in that event it would be helpful to know which OS you are using (including whether it is 32 or 64 bit), which build of Eraser, what the sequence of events was, and what the task log says.

Hope this helps.

David
 
I have the same situation, trying to Erase the contents of a USB attached HDD.
I set up a manual task to erase folders on G:\, when I run the task the drive seems to have a lot of activity for some minutes, then the job finishes with errors. The error log reads:
Error TimeSpan does not accept floating point Not-a-Number values.
and nothing on the HDD has been erased.

I have installed build 1884 and am using Windows 7 64bit.

If I Shift-Delete the contents of the drive, then use Eraser to wipe unsused space I get the effect I am after, but it would be nice if I could do this in one operation.

PS Since this is my first post and having been using Eraser for a couple of years, can I take the opportunity to thank you for a great little program. My coding skills are not good, but let me know the best route to help resolve this issue.
 
I'll leave Joel to comment on the error message; to help him please could you look in the Appdata\Local\Eraser 6 folder in your User folder. There should be a folder called 'Crash Reports', and, if it has not been deleted already, there should be a report folder for the date and time of your error message. If you could post the contents of the debug.log from that folder, that might help.

If you want to clear out a drive with Eraser, there is really no alternative to the kind of two stage process you describe, as the wipe only wipes free space. There is something to be said for erasing the files and folders before you do the wipe, as that makes the destruction even more certain. Also, if you have really deleted everything on the drive, you don't need to erase cluster tips; there shouldn't be any, except in any protected system files that nothing can touch.

David
 
Spike said:
I set up a manual task to erase folders on G:\, when I run the task the drive seems to have a lot of activity for some minutes, then the job finishes with errors. The error log reads:
Error TimeSpan does not accept floating point Not-a-Number values.
and nothing on the HDD has been erased.
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It's part of the new code which calculates the time required to complete the erasure. It's not really undergone full testing (hence it's in a nightly build, and only in the 6.1/6.2 branch) so yes I'll be fixing that with time. Please repost this in the Betas forum (you need to join the Beta Testers group.)

DavidHB said:
If you want to clear out a drive with Eraser, there is really no alternative to the kind of two stage process you describe, as the wipe only wipes free space. There is something to be said for erasing the files and folders before you do the wipe, as that makes the destruction even more certain. Also, if you have really deleted everything on the drive, you don't need to erase cluster tips; there shouldn't be any, except in any protected system files that nothing can touch.
Click to expand...
One of the features that 6.2 will have (but only when the rest of the stability issues are fixed) is the ability to "nuke" a non-system drive when Windows is running: we'll do the erase on a partition or a drive. It's already got a Trac ticket made, but since I'm the only one really working on the codebase I can't promise when I'll be able to get to that.
 
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