Eraser not wiping free space

[dz9700]

Hi, having some difficulty here, I've had no problems wiping specific files/folders with Eraser, though now I'm trying to wipe the free space on my drive and it seems to make no progress - I know this tends to take a long time (done it many times before with Eraser), but I have around 300 GB free and after running for 8 hours it looks to be around 5% done, if that. I'm also not seeing any of the temp folders Eraser creates when you're wiping the free space on a drive. Am doing the 3-pass.

My HDD is a 500 GB mechanical drive (non-SSD), I use Windows 7 Ultimate and am using Eraser 6.0.10.2620. Any help appreciated. Thanks

 

[GregM]

Jeeze, 300 GB x 3 = 900 GB to erase. That's a lot of work for your drive, which is probably why it's struggling. I doubt anything could be recovered after a single pass erase, so why not try it.
Also consider partitioning your HDD afterward so that you would have less free space to overwrite next time.

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/wind ... -hard-disk
http://www.partitionwizard.com/free-par ... nager.html
http://filehippo.com/download_easeus_pa ... ster_home/

 

[dz9700]

It's substantial but something's definitely wrong - I've triple wiped 4 TB drives before and it took maybe a day and a half, I cancelled out the Eraser wipe and tried CCleaner, same thing (triple wipe), it got through only 10 GB in 7 hours - doesn't make any sense, that would mean it would take like a week and a half just to wipe 300 GB, that orders of magnitude slower.

Hopefully this isn't half-assed but my solution right now is to fill the drive with data, wipe the remaining free space which should be tiny, then just delete the copied files.

 

[GregM]

Does Task Manager indicate another program is hogging your resources? Malware?

 

[dz9700]

No, nothing like that. I have an antivirus and firewall running 24/7, and usually am using <10% of the CPU. Nothing suspicious-looking in task manager. Wiping files, even hundreds of GB, works fine, but wiping free space, even on an external drive, eraser will just get to a certain point then hang and never complete.

Any ideas? Thanks

 

[gypsycomp]

I have the almost the same problem.

I formatted a 1.4tb partition.
When I run Eraser i get the error msg, "this program does not have permission to erase the free space on this drive."
I "run as administrator."
Security settings "appear" to give system and administrator permission to access the drive
Any suggestions?

Running ver. 6.0.10.2620, on win7-64-bit, sp1

 

[dz9700]

Hi, wondering if anyone had any ideas Re: my original post? Still having this same problem with Eraser (and C Cleaner as well), wasn't able to find a solution anywhere. Cheers

 

[garrett01]

The actual issue is the size of the files eraser is creating to fill up the diskspace. We will look at how this might be done in the next release.