Can CCleaner wipe the OS drive?

[fracTure]

Hi Guys,  

I did some (Google) research and it looks like maybe the older versions of CC could not wipe the OS drive, but the newer versions can?

Is that correct?

I figure the best place to ask this question is right here!

Thank you very much.

[mta]

don't recall reading that in any recent change logs.

and it would be very alarming if it did or even could.

 

are you referring to wipe free space or wipe entire drive?

[Nergal]

I think what your are referring to is ccleaner not being able to do a full wipe on the hard drive currently running Windows. If you think about this, it makes perfect sense. Just as you cannot destroy a building that you are standing in, to do a full wipe on that drive would, of course, attempt to remove the environment that ccleaner is running in (as well as often times located on itself).

 

Wipe Free Space works fine on a OS drive, though is highly destructive to run on regular basis; and regular ccleaner processes will only (for the most part) clean the drive assigned to program files (usually the same drive as the OS).

[fracTure]

Yes, and that is as I thought.

I can either go with DBAN (this would be for several older XP machines prior to discarding), or I could manually delete sensitive files, then perform Wipe Free Space on the drives.  That would probably serve my purpose.

By the way, it is possible to "destroy a building that you are standing in", but I get the point you were making.  

Thank you for the responses.

[Nergal]

Really permanent storage of or physical destruction of drive is the only way to guarantee unrecoverable data. But either mounting the drive on a separate computer the wiping the drive should work (may need to delete the windows folder before the wipe but I cant remember) or, as you suggested, dban makes a fast job of it