Newbie, Eraser help please.....

[ralphIII]

Hello, I recently installed Eraser and need some help. UPDATED

1) I installed and used Eraser several times since last week which filled up my (c:drive) drive. I then looked for some randomly named files in the (c:drive) as per some intructions and came across these three.

2oBsC5Fglt........... (432mb)
wTxUxO,}(........... (5.62gb)
gfFNG57K+2Q........ (92gb)

Each had scrambled files within and fairly constant at 216mb so deleted all three. I have the hard drive space back now. Please confirm Eraser will create a garbage folder each time it runs?

2) What does Eraser fail to erase as some people recommend using DBAN as it runs from CD/DVD? I just want to be sure all of my personal information is off the computer when I decide to sell it and return to factory defaults.

Thanks, Ralph

 

[DavidHB]

1) I installed and used Eraser several times since last week which filled up my (c:drive) drive. I then looked for some randomly named files in the (c:drive) as per some instructions and came across these three.

2oBsC5Fglt........... (432mb)
wTxUxO,}(........... (5.62gb)
gfFNG57K+2Q........ (92gb)

Each had scrambled files within and fairly constant at 216mb so deleted all three. I have the hard drive space back now. Please confirm Eraser will create a garbage folder each time it runs?

Presumably you were wiping free space. Normally Eraser fills the free space with garbage files to wipe it, then cleans up after itself. I'll leave it to Joel or somebody to advise how you make sure this happens.

2) What does Eraser fail to erase as some people recommend using DBAN as it runs from CD/DVD? I just want to be sure all of my personal information is off the computer when I decide to sell it and return to factory defaults.

Eraser can't fully wipe your system (C drive, as it needs the OS to run. DBAN boots a (tiny) OS of its own, and so can wipe the System drive. Essentially, Eraser is for clearing parts of a running system and DBAN is for clearing the whole system - it's not called boot and nuke for nothing! So much so that many people advise you to physically disconnect any drives you want left untouched before you run DBAN.

For your application, if you have a reinstall disk, or recovery partition you can access without using a Windows drive (e.g. by booting from a CD) - see your computer documentation - it makes sense to use DBAN, then do a factory reset. Expect it to take some, possibly many, hours, however.

David

 

[Joel]

Each had scrambled files within and fairly constant at 216mb so deleted all three. I have the hard drive space back now. Please confirm Eraser will create a garbage folder each time it runs?

Yes, it does -- but typically it's also supposed to be able to get rid of the folder it creates (the code was designed to clean up after itself) but sometimes other programs lock the folder and prevent it from being deleted (Antivirus/search indexer etc)

Yes what you did is correct: for the record: http://bbs.heidi.ie/viewtopic.php?f=35&t=6014.