Serious Issues / Security Risk

F

feedback4u2

New Member
After running wipe free space on one of my dives "SATA Hitachi 500 GB" I noticed it had quite a few permission errors - I was running Eraser from a XP SP3 and wiping a Vista Ultimate drive "dual boot setup" - It appears one must run Eraser from the running platform to produce desired results - After viewing all the errors I created a standard dir "Test Wipe" on the Vista Ultimate drive and copied several files into to from Wall watcher " a windows logging program" and proceeded to wipe the free space on the Vista Ultimate drive again - The setting were DoD ??? the three pass with two additonal passes of random hex giving total pass of five - After this completed and strangely with no errrors I ran a recovery program NT Recover it is a commercial program that takes around two hours to run on a 60 GB Vista Inatall - To my dissapointment and Serious Alarm there in the test dir Test Wipe are my two Wall Watcher files not even touched as if they were just copied - I have not tried other wipe methods maybe there are issues with some and others not but one thing is for sure It would be wise to run a few recovery programs to validate your eraser program or whatever wiping program you are using is actually producing desired results!

I felt it obligated to report to the community with such a serious error! - IMO the Hitachis 500GB has been around for several years or the model has so it is not a new hybird 6GB "Magnetic / Solid State Combo" or even a pure Solid State Drive it is old fassion single platter.
 
Sorry I did not mention the delete method - I send one file to Recycle Bin and the other Shift Del on spot.

I have tried several free wipe free space programs and all have issues - I understand the risk of running Beta or RC software as I dabble with Ubuntu but to have a stable release producing such errors is :shock: - I am sure there are many programing considerations for the Eraser program with all the newer hard drive platforms but the standard single / double platter hd should be the last one to have issues with. - I will check for updates as I really believe in the GPL software!
 
Please see this thread. I strongly suspect that you have encountered one or more of the issues described or linked to therein.

Joel will advise on the problems that arise from running Eraser in a dual boot configuration of this kind. Permissions and ownership will inevitably be an issue.

David
 
Permissions and ownership is a potential factor. One thing I noticed is that you didn't delete your Wall Watcher files (which I assume to be your test data) unused space erasures do not erase files which still exist to the file system.
 
Joel said:
One thing I noticed is that you didn't delete your Wall Watcher files (which I assume to be your test data) unused space erasures do not erase files which still exist to the file system.
Click to expand...
I was caught out first time on this too, but in his/her second post, the OP said (s)he deleted the files; at least I assume that's what 'sending to the Recycle Bin' means.

I'm inclined to think that the recovery utility has found shadow copies in this case, but that is, of necessity, a guess.

David
 
I am quite surprised that no errors were reported. Shadow copies could be a possibility, but unless he rebooted into Vista, or the files were left on the drive for a long time, there shouldn't be enough time for a shadow copy to be created.

@feedback: how long did the task take to complete? Did you enable cluster tip erasing?
 
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