Eraser cannot erase - access denied.

gentilr

New Member
Help! I have an external hard drive that i've erased all the files from and formatted. When i try to wipe it clean using Eraser, the event status says "Completed with Errors." The event log says this: "Error Could not erase files and subfolders in E:\System Volume Information because Access to the path 'E:\System Volume Information' is denied." Can someone help me past this issue? Thanks - Robert
 
System Volume Information is a protected folder and thus it cannot be erased. If you wish to destroy one drive, you can try to format the drive and run an unused space erase on the drive afterward, it should have the same effect.

HTH.
 
hi Joel - thanks very much for the fast reply! I've tried it again and even unchecked "force locked files to be unlocked for deletion" or something like that but keep getting the same message. I have the unused disk space set to be overwritten 35 times to be safe. I cannot see an option to just overwrite a blank hard drive or something like that. If you have any screen shots you can send to help me - send to mr-italiano at rogers.com. thanks! - Robert
 
You can erase a complete (non system) drive in the 6.1 (beta) builds. But you can do the same thing in 6.0.8 just by doing a normal Windows quick format of the drive,then erasing the free space. Before doing that, you could also turn off System Restore for the drive in question; that will delete any Restore Point data you may have accumulated on the drive, and should ensure that Eraser makes all user data on that drive non-recoverable.

For a free space erase on a reasonably modern drive, a single pass is almost certainly sufficient. Increasing the number of passes has no effect on the locked files issue. As Joel said, some files and folders just cannot be written to by uses under any circumstances.

David
 
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