Trying to erase a whole hard drive

faceless007

New Member
Hi, I was recommended to use this program to securely erase a hard disk; I've never used it or any other data removal program before. However, I can't seem to get it to work; it says that it completed the task, but when I open the drive in Explorer, all the files are still clearly there and I can open and read them.

The hard disk is a SATA drive connected through an eSATA connection to my Windows XP SP3 32-bit computer. It's divided into 2 partitions, one 20GB one 576GB. I'm using Eraser 6.06.1376, and I created a new task to manually erase G:\ (the 20GB partition). In Edit Task, the "Files in Folder" option is selected and G:\ in the text box. However, after I ran the task, it said "Completed with errors" and the log only had 1 entry
"Session: Wednesday, January 13, 2010 3:54:02 PM
Wednesday, January 13, 2010 3:54:03 PM Error Access to the path 'G:\System Volume Information' is denied."

Looking in Explorer, all the files of G:\ are still there. I'm running as an admin, so even if it can't erase that folder it should be able to erase all the unlocked files. What's going on?

I've also read that DBAN is a good alternative, but that will be a hassle to use because I only want to erase the external HD, not the internal one, so I'd have to open the computer and disconnect the HD then boot into DBAN, etc. I'd rather do this from Windows if possible.
 
You'll need to exclude the "System Volume Information" folder as that stores Windows' System Restore points. Alternatively, you can format the drive and run an unused space erasure. Short of DBAN as of now that's about as good as it gets.

DBAN can work with all your internal drives plugged in, you just need to be horribly careful about which drives you wipe.
 
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