Suspiciously fast completion

[dd-b]

I'm cleaning off some external drives to sell. I'm doing the cleanup on my Windows 7 Ultimate 64 system. The drives were previously part of a ZFS filesystem on Solaris.

First I use disk manager to make the drives into windows drives. This seems to work (size is right, for example).

Then I try to erase the free space on those drives. I've done this several ways, using right-click on the drive letter, and using the explicit eraser interface.

This claims to work; the dialog box pops up and progress bars march across it. But it completes in just a few seconds.

These are 1TB external USB drives. It doesn't look reasonable to me that it could actually be overwriting the free space on these drives in that time.

 

[dd-b]

Doesn't seem to matter if I use quick format or regular format when making them windows drives (except that regular format takes a long time, of course).

 

[Joel]

Can you double-check that the task indeed is doing an Unused Space Erase (Drive Letter in the Task Properties dialog? If that's correctly set, can you copy and paste the task log here? Select the entries and right-click on them to show the context menu.

 

[dd-b]

Definitely it was doing "Unused space on drive", and for the right drive. First attachment is a screenshot of the task properties dialog box.

I can't find a task log; there's an overall log at File / View Log, which only shows the scheduler starting and quitting. There's no task log entries if I right-click the task.

 

[dd-b]

Okay, found one problem that's my fault -- I had an outdated version. Apparently I spaced installing the new version I downloaded.

At least on very brief examination, the problem does not occur with Eraser 6.0.10. I was previously running 5.8.8.

That may be old enough that you should just forget about this.

(There is a view task log on the right-click menu for each task, too; that was actually what first nudged me hard enough to check versions.)

Yeah, the progress bar is still just a quarter inch or some such (meaning 1/10 or some such); it's definitely not tearing through it unreasonably the way it did last time.

 

[DavidHB]

Just to complete the discussion, Eraser 5.x is no longer officially supported, and, as Joel said, we tend to be digging deep into the collective memory to answer questions about it ...

David