Drive Wipe Usb

[Serafin Sonnier]

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.

nwipe is very good and available on Linux Distros which can run from a USB stick nwipe - Wikipedia . It is useful to have Puppy Linux with its programmes on a USB stick to use as a tool -woof-ce.github.io/

Random overwrite (selected by default): Overwrites your data with random patterns. The number of times AVG overwrites your data is determined by the number you specify. Click the text box and type a number of passes (the default number is 1). This is the simplest and quickest method.

DOD (Department of Defense) 5220.22-M algorithm: Overwrites your data with several types of data (0, 1, and random characters) within three passes. This method is more secure, but slightly slower than the Random overwrite method.

Gutmann algorithm: Overwrites your data according to the encoding mechanism used by the drive. The Gutmann algorithm performs the largest number of passes over the data in comparison with other methods. This is the slowest, but the most secure method.

As the traditional method for securely erasing hard disks cannot be used on SSDs, a different solution is required. This usually comes directly from the manufacturers of the solid state disks. Virtually all well-known manufacturers offer programs for managing SSDs via the support area. Almost without exception, these also offer the option of deleting the corresponding SSD. Examples include the Samsung Magician, the Sandisk SSD Dashboard, the OCZ SSD Utility or the Corsair SSD Toolbox.

Check your actual drives too. Some models, typically higher end or business class, have a encryption key that you simply change using the manufacturer management software and the drive is effectively wiped clean in less than a second.

* Number of licenses corresponds to the number of disks you can erase in parallel:Freeware license can erase 2 drives concurrently on one machine1 user license can erase 2 drives concurrently on one machine2 user licenses can erase 2 drives concurrently on 2 machines3 user licenses can erase 3 drives concurrently on 3 machines# user licenses can erase # drives concurrently on # machinesSite and Enterprise licenses: unlimited concurrent erasures and installations

Active@ KillDisk gives you a fast, easy way to delete your files and folders for good if you're getting rid of your hard drive. While it's not as advanced as some other permanent deletion programs, it offers enough bonus features to keep you interested. The professional, welcoming look earns it a few extra points.

Simply deleting files, or even formatting the disk, does nothing to stop a determined snoop. This program, a powerful (and free!) set of tools, promises to do something much more useful. ...... once the program has done its job, there is no turning back.

We have been using this to satisfy data wiping requirements at the university before disposing of old equipment. It is very simple to use so we are able to have workstudies wiping the drives. It does take several hours on a 3 pass wipe, but I don't think anything can be done about the time due to the nature of what the software has to do. It would be nice if there were audible or more obvious visual prompts that a wipe has completed, so the workstudy can see at a glance without looking at the small status window.

If you have ever found yourself in the situation where you want to delete multiple drives, whether it is because of some confidential data that you want to get rid of or maybe some nasty virus has plagued your drives and you have no ways of removing it, then Active@ KillDisk might be the best solution for you. Active@ KillDisk is a data security application that permanently deletes any data on physical disk drives without any chance of recovering it.

At some point in time all of come to a situation where privacy or business might be in danger of unwanted leaks. This does not to be a situation where you might be an outlaw running from the police, you are just might an ordinary person who wants sell his old HDD.

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..

Some people claim, this is not enough and one should overwrite hard disks multiple times and with more elaborate patterns (scrub(1) can do both of that as per the other answer), but most will say once is enough, if an attacker wants to restore more than a few bits with a significant chance.

Nwipe, it's a fork of DBAN but unlike DBAN is actively in development. It can run as a command line tool or it's default mode is ncurses GUI. It's in the debian, ubuntu, Fedora repositories. Or if you want to run from a USB stick shredOS, which uses nwipe.

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.

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