Running eraser in safe mode

[devils82]

Hi Guys,
I have been using eraser for some time now and find the program very useful. However, I have a program that is suppose to remove all traces of your internet activity. I decided to see if this program works as it says it does and ran a image recovery program. I was still able to recover most of the items that were viewed on the internet. I ran a recovery program and recovered the temporary internet files. I then used eraser to get rid of the temporary internet files. When I ran another scan, some of the files were still there and I can not find their location. I ran Eraser to wipe Free space on disc, but these files are still there. Perhaps they were stored somewhere Eraser can't access. Anyway, I thought if I ran eraser while the computer was in safe mode I would get better results. Is it safe to do this? I was worried I might damage the operating system.
Thanks,
Devils82

 

[Kythe]

Hi Guys,
I have been using eraser for some time now and find the program very useful. However, I have a program that is suppose to remove all traces of your internet activity. I decided to see if this program works as it says it does and ran a image recovery program. I was still able to recover most of the items that were viewed on the internet. I ran a recovery program and recovered the temporary internet files. I then used eraser to get rid of the temporary internet files. When I ran another scan, some of the files were still there and I can not find their location. I ran Eraser to wipe Free space on disc, but these files are still there. Perhaps they were stored somewhere Eraser can't access. Anyway, I thought if I ran eraser while the computer was in safe mode I would get better results. Is it safe to do this? I was worried I might damage the operating system.
Thanks,
Devils82

If you ran a recovery program to see what deleted files you could find, make sure the recovery program didn't undelete the files in the process. A free space wipe won't take care of files if they've been recovered

I ran into this problem during testing, too. But I've run Encase, Winhex and other freespace searching/file recovery programs in an effort to recover known-deleted files after freespace wipes with Eraser, and I've never been able to recover a thing.

My extensive testing of Eraser has confirmed, to my satisfaction, that it does what it says it does: erases files (including MFT entries and files stored entirely in the MFT). I've confirmed this by doing before and after viewing of the raw disk data. However, Eraser won't erase deleted temporary copies of the files, nor will it erase material temporarily stored in the NTFS journaling system file called $LogFile. It also won't eliminate data stored in the system page file ("pagefile.sys") or hibernation file.

In the case of web surfing history information, you may also have to worry about User Assist records and Index.dat log files.

Anyway, what you're finding may very well be located in other areas. That's one reason why freespace wipes and page file encryption/deletion are so important to run from time to time: they eliminate some of these sources of data leakage.

The bottom line is that Windows and NTFS are very messy from data, and there are many "sneak routes" for data to remain on your system even after you've erased a given file.