ccleaner drive wipe taking forever

[Plaidipus]

i have 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?

[Nergal]

How big a drive? Is it your system drive (drive windows is run from)? Did you set secure multiple passes (can't remember if that applies to WFS but I think it does).

[nukecad]

How big is your drive?

How many passes have you specified?

Wiping a drive takes time,  you have to write random data to all free space and then delete it again.

Bigger disk or more passes will take more time.

 

[Plaidipus]

set to a single pass.   
1.68 tb freespace.

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.

[Andavari]

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.

[Plaidipus]

@Andavari Is chkdsk/r a program on Windows or ccleaner?   How would I go about that? 

[mxz55]

51 minutes ago, Andavari said:

ChkDsk /r

I would recommend the syntax chkdsk /F /V /R /X /B /spotfix to anyone that wants to run it for fixing errors/mainentance.

9 minutes ago, Plaidipus said:

@Andavari Is chkdsk/r a program on Windows or ccleaner?   How would I go about that? 

It's a Windows feature, to check for disk errors and automatically attempt to repair them. So it's safe.

 

Anyways, on traditional hard disks (even more so those without a high read/write speed in MB/s, or with a lot of data or free space), "wipe free space" can only be expected to take extremely long.

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.

Edited September 3, 2019 by mxz55

[nukecad]

1.68 tb is quite a lot to wipe and is going to take some time.

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.

[Plaidipus]

I don't usually worry about it either but it starts saying days and continually gets longer, it gets my attention.   

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.   

I must have needed a few days off work since I can't do anything until it's done. 

[nukecad]

34 minutes ago, Plaidipus said:

I must have needed a few days off work since I can't do anything until it's done. 

"Our system is currently unavailable due to maintenance", always good for a day off.

[Augeas]

None of us would be so fooish to wipe free space on an SSD, would we?

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.

P.S. Are you running WFS in Options/Settings or Drive Wiper? If in Options did you check Wipe MFT?

[Plaidipus]

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. 

[nukecad]

An SSD is a Solid-State Drive, as opposed to a HDD which has spinning magnetic disc(s).
They should not (normally) be defragmented and they don't need to be wiped.

Wiping free space is not going to speed anything up, if it's a HDD then defragmenting might do.

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.

Have a read of this article that explains about wiping free space, when and why you should do it, and why you shouldn't wipe an SSD:
https://www.howtogeek.com/115573/htg-explains-why-you-only-have-to-wipe-a-disk-once-to-erase-it/

 

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.

[Andavari]

10 hours ago, Plaidipus said:

That's where it got hung up last time

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.

If it freezes again and if I were you I wouldn't push my luck with it!

[Plaidipus]

I did a disk repair.  The drive wipe finally finished.  I checked and I don't have ssd.  

Thanks for your help. 

[mxz55]

On 04/09/2019 at 23:58, Plaidipus said:

I did a disk repair.  The drive wipe finally finished.

It could be interesting for others to know exactly what did the trick.

Do you mean a chkdsk with "disk repair", or some sort of HDD health regeneration software?

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.

Edited September 8, 2019 by mxz55

[Greeve]

I am having the same problem. I think it is because Ccleaner does not (appear) to disable 'sleep' during wipe.

If you disable 'sleep' in your PC settings it should work.

Ccleaner needs a disable sleep while wipeing setting!