Eraser 5.85 Beta 5

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Joel

Joel

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Thank you Joel I am testing now !!!!!!! :lol:

We are down to only 8 “confirmed” posts in the bugs section now and some of those are almost fixed or questionable !!!!!! :D
 
I'll tell you what Joel, I think you should have one last look at all the confirmed but not resolved threads in the bugs section and decide if they need fixing. Eraser 5X is basically bug free !!! :D

I haven’t found anything wrong yet !

Amazing in less than 2 weeks ! :shock:

Bug free !
:lol:
 
Hopefully..
 
Joel said:
Hopefully..
Click to expand...


There’s no hopefully about it, it works !!!

Is there any chance of fitting a couple of feature requests into 5X before abandoning it to work on V6 ?

I only ask as you seem to be able to add features so quick that it might not actually take you long but it would make a huge difference to me and a couple of other people I know.

If you don’t mind could you make it so Eraser could wipe an entire attached drive physically not logically ?

Thanks.
:wink:
 
As in, dismount the drive and heck about NTFS and just erase the drive clean?

Sounds dangerous... I have an idea in my head but I doubt that sounds testable (I got no drive to sacrifice!)

Joel
 
I mean like overwrite the entire drive like I can with WinHex.

Say you plug in a USB attached hard drive or perhaps a flash drive, it would be cool to be able to totally wipe them not at the file system level but hit every sector on the drive like DBAN does. (Note I don’t mean the C drive local disk).

I believe it was a popular feature request some time ago.
 
No. That will not happen. Windows will lock the disk. You can't even run chkdsk on C: when Windows is running how do you expect Eraser to wipe the disk clean?

Joel
 
Joel said:
Sounds dangerous... I have an idea in my head but I doubt that sounds testable (I got no drive to sacrifice!)
Click to expand...

I am happy to do any destructive tests needed. I've set up a VM windows desktop for testing
 
I can also do destructive tests. :D

Jackjack I think you know what I am trying to explain, can you write this request better than me ? I don’t know how to word it ! :?
 
It makes sense to me. But let me try.

Overwiter wants to be able to attach an external drive to a running windows system that has eraser installed. Using this live system he wants to be able to be able to run a DBan like erase of the whole external HDD rather than just the partition wipe that eraser is capable of at the moment.

While I can see where Joel is coming from in thinking that Windows locks the drive, it must be doable, taking into account that truecrypt is able to un-mount and encrypt a whole disk device which is effectively the same thing.

OSX is also capable of this with its disk utility tool. You can chose to wipe the whole drive or partition, if you chose the former it unmounts it and wipes the whole drive

For what it's worth, this would be a fantastic feature as I would no longer be reliant on needing a spare machine to wipe disks.
 
Remember TrueCrypt is a fle system driver and can do that because it is running as SYSTEM (not as your user name). I reckon we can do that... but probably maybe only for v6, unfortunately. I don't believe users can just dismount drives (even so, I don't know the Windows API call for it.. yet.)

Joel
 
Thanks jackjack, I just had a mental block and I didn’t know how to write that out !

Joel, I use a program called WinHex that can mount an attached external drive in “physical” mode and WinHex is portable ! This then enables me to write to every sector of the drive. Does this give you any clues as to how they are doing it ?

Thanks guys.
 
I dunno. I believe we can open the physical drive using CreateFile and write to it... I guess... I dunno. Seems hard.

Joel
 
Dunno, nothing on MSDN documents this.
 
Wouldn’t the Truecrypt source be any use to you ? Could you see how they did it ?

Also the guy who writes WinHex (Stefan Fleischmann) is quite easy going and as Eraser is free software he may give you some help.

Here is the WinHex forum.

Or how about the DBAN creator, dajhorn ?

I have just thought of someone else I could ask, I will send an e-mail now.
:wink:
 
No, no and no.

TrueCrypt is a file system driver. Unmounting is easy, writing the disk clean is hard (low level I/O)

The guy who wrote WinHex, maybe. You talk to him since you use his stuff... :)

DBAN? no. They use the Linux kernel and write it on the low level I/O side.

Joel
 
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