30 replies to this topic

[mookey]

May sound a little thick here but does Cclean Drive Wiper actually wipe the whole of the drive including my operating system of Windows 7. So that i can start again truly from scratch so to speak. Its just that another wipe drive cleaner i had would not clean the os off. Thanks, Mookey

[Augeas]

The documentation for this feature says that checking '...Entire Drive will erase all of the files on the drive. WARNING, this means the whole of the drive will be erased.' Make of that what you will.

As this is a new feature the mechanics of this are not fully understood. Obviously an application running under Windows can't wipe the drive it's running on. Possibly it can do this on a non-system non-CC partition or drive. If you're fully confident that you can rebuild from scratch then you could try Drive Wiper and report back afterwards.

[Nergal]

Oh goody a challenge I'll make a back up of my Virtual Machine and then try this Hurrah!!!!

[mtntravel]

mookey, on 03 November 2010 - 05:02 AM, said:

May sound a little thick here but does Cclean Drive Wiper actually wipe the whole of the drive including my operating system of Windows 7. So that i can start again truly from scratch so to speak. Its just that another wipe drive cleaner i had would not clean the os off. Thanks, Mookey

The new drive wiper utility does not erase everything on the entire boot drive (the drive which is running the operating system on it). But it will however, wipe everything on partitioned drive(s), flash drives, slave drives, and external drives. A very nice addition to the program.

There are other tools/programs out there that will create a boot disk which will wipe your entire main drive securely. It would be nice if ccleaner would include that type of utility in a future version.

[MrRon]

I've added some extra info to the docs about what the  Erase Drive setting does
http://www.piriform....free-disk-space

[Augeas]

Not enough info for us sad cases, Mr Ron.

Can you or Mtntravel say:

On a non-system drive, is every file deleted, so you have to do a format to bring the drive/partition back to life?

On a system drive, what files are deleted, or left if that's easier? I can't grasp how that's done - is everything in Docs and Settings for all user profiles removed, or is it more sophisticated than that?

[MrRon]

Augeas, on 05 November 2010 - 09:49 AM, said:

On a non-system drive, is every file deleted, so you have to do a format to bring the drive/partition back to life?

On a system drive, what files are deleted, or left if that's easier? I can't grasp how that's done - is everything in Docs and Settings for all user profiles removed, or is it more sophisticated than that?

On a non-sys drive, if you select Erase Drive, it will reformat the drive, then overwrite the whole drive.  So everything will be gone and unrecoverable.   Really, really, gone. But the drive will be left formatted.

You can't select Erase Drive for a system drive, but if you select Free Space only, this will not delete any files, just overwrite the free space.  This is exactly the same feature in Advanced > Wipe Free Space.

[JDPower]

MrRon, on 08 November 2010 - 12:12 PM, said:

On a non-sys drive, if you select Erase Drive, it will reformat the drive, then overwrite the whole drive.  So everything will be gone and unrecoverable.   Really, really, gone. But the drive will be left formatted.

Didn't realise that was in the new version, scary feature to add given CCleaner is supposed to be a 'safe' cleaner. We've had people come here screaming about CCleaner wiping their entire drive and we've always been able to say "That's impossible", can't say that any more can we

[Nergal]

It's nearly IMPOSSIBLE to accidenally erase a drive using the new tool.  A warning box appears when you do it.  You must first type ERASE and press enter (or click ok) before any erasure occurs

[JDPower]

Nergal, on 10 November 2010 - 08:32 PM, said:

It's nearly IMPOSSIBLE to accidenally erase a drive using the new tool.  A warning box appears when you do it.  You must first type ERASE and press enter (or click ok) before any erasure occurs

"nearly" - that's the word that doesn't inspire confidence. (I'm not picking fault with the function itself, but just know it's gonna cause problems with newbies assuming as always, if its there they should run it)

Nice to know what the warning/protection was, I wasn't about to risk hitting 'Wipe' just to see if there was a nice big warning message

[Alan_B]

CLEAN is good

ERASE is so much STRONGER - what could go wrong ! ! ! !

We know that people use Wipe Free Space because they think it increases the free space on their SSD.
We know that people use Gutman 35 pass because it is so much better than 1 pass, and they want their SSD to have the best treatment.

Instead of expecting the user to understand what is meant when he types ERASE,
it might be better if he was given a multi-choice question,
"What Benefit do you want from ERASE"
and only accept the correct answer.

Or of course they can learn the hard way.

Alan

[Nergal]

JDPower, on 10 November 2010 - 09:07 PM, said:

"nearly" - that's the word that doesn't inspire confidence. (I'm not picking fault with the function itself, but just know it's gonna cause problems with newbies assuming as always, if its there they should run it)

Heh that's just my refusal to call anything "impossible" I'd have to rate it as a 99.(9)%chance of not being accidental.

[Nobles]

I tried running CCleaner's Drive Wiper from a WinPE bootable USB stick and tried to erase the hard drive in a test notebook computer I have here and it did not work.  It will not seem to erase the entire disk even if you select that option.  It appears to only erase the free space.  Is there a way to get the the erase entire drive feature to work from a bootable WinPE stick and erase another drive in a notebook or desktop?  Does it skip doing the full erase if the target drive is bootable, even if it is not the one you are currently booted from?

[bhayley]

This might be a dumb question, but:

I started to use the wiper a few months ago just to see what was happening. It was taking away all my free space - after the wiping process is done, what type of free space can I expect on my hard drive?

Thanks.

[Nergal]

what it is doing is filling the freespace it will then permanently delete that filling leaving you with the same amount of freespace, but with the possiblity of retrieval of deleted data greatly reduced.

[Voxoptic]

I'm an avid cCleaner user, and only recently stumbled upon the drive wiping feature. I didn't notice any documentation pertaining to the wiping method or if it is concidered a "Secure" erase. We usually use Acronis' Drive Cleanser tool which uses a triple pass algorithm and meets "DoD 5220.22-M" specifications. (See - http://www.usaid.gov...00/d522022m.pdf - for additional info)

I guess what Im asking is, does your method meet these requirements and can it wipe all data permanently?

[hazelnut]

Info on ccleaner's deletion methods can be seen on this page here

http://www.piriform....leaner-settings

[Voxoptic]

Thank you so much, that was completely my fault for not spending a few more minutes searching for the info I needed .

Edit:
Quick question here... I read this
"Note: CCleaner can only securely delete files which have not yet been deleted from the Recycle Bin. If you have already delete files insecurely (for example, using Windows Explorer), you can delete them securely using Recuva."

I haven't heard that the "Secure" erase using NSA or DoD standards didn't delete the items that were placed in the Recylcing bin during a systems use, so I should use Recuva after I run either NSA or DoD erase methods to ensure that no data from the bin was left behind?

Edited by Voxoptic, 22 March 2012 - 11:03 AM.

[Augeas]

That quote from the docs is, I think, rather confusing.

It is talking about secure file deletion, which is not the same as Wipe Free Space, and that's what this ancient thread is about. The quote is saying that CC will only securely delete files (i.e. overwrite files) that haven't already been deleted. It then suggests that to overwrite already deleted files you should use Recuva to select them and overwrite them. However CC's Wipe Free Space will do that, in bulk.

Perhaps the quote is left over from before WFS was implemented in CC. The reference to the recycler just confuses.

[sixthgate]

Hello. I have a question. So I'm at college working off of an old windows vista that I've reformatted to be a Windows 7 Ultimate Edition. Well, I have two main drives on my computer, Recovery Drive (C:) and OS (D:). I currently have my Windows 7 Ultimate Edition formatted to my Recovery Drive (C:), but my Recovery Drive (C:) only has about 10 GB's of space and its full, not allowing me to install any programs, and disturbing the performance of my computer. My OS (D:) which has 136 GB on it, is also full but I would like to wipe my OS (D:) drive and reformat THAT disk to have Windows 7 Ultimate Edition on it. However, when I use CCleaner to wipe the drive of OS (D:), after I type ERASE into the message box, an error message keeps coming up saying ACCESS IS DENIED. I cant seem to find any topics about how to fix this, and I don't know what to do myself. If anyone can help me i would very much appreciate it.

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