Wipe A Drive

[Fidelia Boldul]

ihave been using ccleaner for years and have never had any trouble. i haven't done a freespace wipe in a while so i decided i better do it. i can't even let it finish. i set it to wipe and it was taking hours. i let it go overnight. in the morning, the computer was a sleep and the drive wipe was still at 17% with a forecast of days to finish. i canceled it and started it again after reinstalling the app. again, it sat there at 12% just increasing it's estimated time to finish. any ideas?

my concern is that it sticks at about 12-17% and doesn't move for hours. that can't be normal. it should be able to do it over night. it just keeps adding up how much time it will take. it got up to saying four days etc to complete.

I wonder if first running ChkDsk /r (which will take several hours in of itself) on that hard disk would fix the issue, i.e.; maybe CCleaner is stuck on a bad disk block, or some other error causing it issues.

If you think it was previously way faster, then think about if the free space or used space was around the same, if it was, then yeah your disk's health might be deteriorating (and with that the reading/writing speeds). Also make sure to check in CCleaner options, if you didn't accidentally select more hard disks/drive letters to clean in Wipe free space mode, than you previously used to.

I never take much notice of when a programme says it will take such and such a length of time to complete.

That's only ever an estimate based on what it is seeing/doing at that time and is often way out, the programme usually finishes well before the estimate.

I ran a defrag again, and all of the disk doctor type programs. Overnight it finally did the first scan and started actually wiping. The projected time has been at about 6 hours since I checked this morning, (5 hours ago). At least it isn't piling more time on top. It was at 1% this morning, 17% now. That's where it got hung up last time so I hope it keeps going and actually gets done.

We don't really know the mechanics of wiping free space (CC's mechanics) but we're pretty sure it allocates a large enough file to fill the disk and then deletes it. How is that file allocated? I would hope in big chunks for a start, but CC's code dates back to cro-magnon times so we can't really be sure. If it allocates initially in 1 gb chunks then the MFT record will very soon be full, and an extension record allocated. And another, and another, and then an index record, holding all the addresses of all the MFT records. The MFT record(s) for such a file could be horrendous. As the disk fills smaller allocations would be necessary, to grab the smaller spaces. More MFT mayhem.

I think that the optimun conditions for a WFS would be if the free space is defragged first. Then the big file allocation would be eased, big chunks would do most of it. Small free spaces can, as I know, be missed by WFS. The process seems to allocate in minimum 32k or so chunks.

What's an ssd? I'm using the wiper in ccleaner to wipe the free space on my laptop. It's been really slow this week making processing photos nearly impossible. Since I cleaned off all of the old photos, it has plenty of space so I figured a good cleaning might help it get back up to speed so I can work.

Wiping free space is used to securely delete any old files on the HDD disc so they can't be recovered by recovery software.

You would typically only use it if you were selling on the computer (or the disc) to someone else, so that they couldn't try and recover any files that you had normally deleted.

EDIT If your machine has suddenly started running slower then I would suspect another cause.

Take a look in task manager (right click anywhere on the taskbar and select 'Task Manager) to see if something is hogging your CPU.

Drive wiping/free space wiping tools have the ability to screw up a hard disk if they hang/freeze and even if the user cancels what they're doing. Usually the disk will be marked as the RAW format and a utility like Microsoft's own FDISK would have to be used to repair the disk.

Anyways, if the latter was neccesary to get free space wipe to start doing something meaningful, then you can rest assured that your HDD is at the end of its lifespan, deteriorating, and that this "repair" has only temporarily extended it. This then also explains why you always were able to do free space wipes on acceptable speeds (you said that you noticed things changed) on the same huge sized HDD. So in that case I would stop relying on your HDD, evacuate important files, and get a new one.

There are other free tools to wipe a hard disk clean outside of Windows such as some Linux distros, and DBAN. If you use a wipe tool outside of Windows make sure that it doesn't also nuke the Recovery partition that installs Windows.

When in the GUI and it shows up under filesystems, you can umount it from there - being a USB drive, they sometimes automount. Once the file system is umounted you can then go to the Physical Disks tab and you should be able to wipe it.

This is what I would do... Download and run a live cd on a PC of GParted. Using this tool delete all the partitions on the USB drive and then recreate the partition table as MBR. Then format the drive as FAT32 being USB. GPT partition tables are required for large drives over 2Tb and PC's running a UEFI BIOS. If you are setting up the 500Gb drive as USB storage on a Pi, use FAT32 if you wish to remove the drive and use the data elsewhere. NTFS will give you no end of issues due to security anf linux filesystems (EXT) are far better for network storage non removable..

I do not care about "securely" wiping the data I just want it wiped so I can re-establish the partition structure and filesystem from scratch. Is there an alternate way (using standard utilities) that can perform a quick (within a minute or two) wipe for this type of scenario? The device I'm working on is FreeBSD but I think the dd command (and gpart, etc) work similarly between it and Linux.

will tell the drive to just drop all data. That's going to be very quick, as it basically is just telling the wear leveling table that "hey, forget that any of the blocks ever were used for data, and treat them as ready to be nulled and used again".

Even if it's that quick, it will have the nice side effect of "nulling", i.e. it makes the old data irrecoverable (short of opening the hardware, circumventing the storage controller inside, and reading raw data an taking a huge guess on what block in which order needs to be reassembled).

My company has issued an encrypted USB flash drive which I stored my personal data in it. I am resigning from the company and I wanted to wipe the data in the usb drive but I have forgotten the password.

For a hard disk, overwriting every data sector once with zeroes (or any character/octet) is sufficient to erase data. However this does not apply to flash-memory based devices such as typical USB memory sticks.

Flash memory devices use a concept known as wear-levelling, this means that some areas of storage will be rotated out of use and will not normally be accessible when using normal filesystem operations like writing a file. This makes erasing these devices more complicated. You need to make sure that any erasure tool you use is designed to work with devices that use wear-levelling.

I have an old Sandisk Cruzer device that uses the infamous U3 encryption system. When you first plug this in, all your computer sees is a small "CD-ROM" device that contains the U3 software and an autorun file. The encrypted data is in a non-visible "device" that the computer cannot see.

Only when you enter the password into the U3 software does the software make the encrypted device visible to the computer - which then assigns it a separate drive-letter (in the case of Windows) to that assigned to the pseudo-CD-ROM.

Large serious companies that take security seriously are likely to purchase devices that can be centrally managed. Part of this is making provision for lost passwords by having a separate administrative password that can allow an administrator to regain full access to a device where the user's personal password has been lost.

All in all, someone might regard it as a lucky blessing unfortunate minor disaster if their sister's Rottweiler chewed the device up and crushed the storage chips inside before they could rescue it. Make sure that doesn't happen to you.

If that happened to me, I'd offer to pay my employer the costs (hardware and administrative) to them caused by my foolish carelessness. Taking responsibility for their actions and paying for mistakes is something that adults are expected to do.

Since you're using Windows 10, you might be able to use DiskPart, depending on how the encryption works. If the flash drive doesn't even present the encrypted partition's storage space to the OS without unlocking it via some special low-level mechanism, then the only thing you can do is physical destruction, but this might help somebody:

At the company I work at, we use similar encrypted USB keys to transfer data.The drive contains a partition which presents itself as being an optical drive. This partition contains the executable files to decrypt and mount the second encrypted "data" partition to the system.

The software included on our USB keys has a 'forgot password' functionality, which wipes the data off the data partition.

I suppose that the tool actually changes the encryption keys used to decrypt the data partition, making the data irretrievable for anyone who didn't know the private encryption key of the data partition.

Check whether your key's software has an option to flash the drive or to reset the password.

Actually, as long as your company doesn't know the passphrase used to unlock the decryption (private) key or the decryption key itself, there's no risk of the company being able to extract your data from the key (unless the encryption scheme is really weak and trivially reversible, which would defy the purpose of those encrypted keys).

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