Disk Wiper does not wipe freespace

rationalmind

That is it, Disk Wiper does not wipe anything. I am speaking disk freespace in particular.

stever

I ran Disk Wiper today and noticed that it reports a number of bytes written. The number shown was less than 1GB, but my disk has about 8GB of free space. Either it didn't wipe most of the disk, or this number means something else. Can anyone explain?

I tried the Handbook, but the word Wiper doesn't even appear in it!

jepe

The handbook is still the version of PT 2005 and there was no Disk Wiper Tool.

Jean-Paul

stever

All the more reason for a Macecraft employee to jump in and answer these questions.

jv16

Most likely the program counts the number of bytes written wrong, I'll take a closer look and let you know whether I find something to fix.

jv16

Is the drive you tried the feature on an NTFS or FAT drive? Could you also give exact step-by-step instructions how did you try to use the feature?

I have now tested the feature on two different environments with many different drives without any problems whatsoever.

stever

NTFS, I think. It's an older Dell Latitude laptop running Windows 2000 that I'm about to give away if anyone will take it.

tullik

There are some other Disk Wiper reports in the Tech Support Forum here: http://www.macecraft.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?p=4374#4374

tullik

Just did two disk free space wipes:

USB stick: free space 204 MB, data written 1021 MB, elapsed time 22 minutes

USB hard disk: free space 77 GB, data written 7 GB, elapsed time 8 minutes

Does that seem right?

rationalmind

It does not wipe anything on my end. From 3 NTFS drives it wipes 0 bytes free. Useless feature for me unless fixed in the future.

tullik

tullik wrote
Just did two disk free space wipes:

USB stick: free space 204 MB, data written 1021 MB, elapsed time 22 minutes

USB hard disk: free space 77 GB, data written 7 GB, elapsed time 8 minutes

Does that seem right?

Those also were NTFS. Correction: the USB stick is FAT.

I got the "zero" or other absurd results with these:

Internal SATA hard drive, NTFS, free space 115 GB, data written 0 GB, elapsed time 0 minutes Note: this drive contains only Recycler, S.V.I., and an empty directory.

Internal SATA hard drive, NTFS, free space 157 GB, data written 5 GB, elapsed time 6.5 minutes Note: this is the boot drive.

Internal SATA hard drive, NTFS, free space 88 GB, data written 1.5 GB, elapsed time 1.1 minutes Note: this is a bootable drive.

The progress bar is essentialy useless -- it jumps to 50% at the start, stays there until it jumps to 100% at the end.

redseujac

Well I did a Disk Wipe of free space too:

Internal Ultra-ATA/100 Seagate 7200 RPM Capacity: 200 GB

- Real capacity NTFS partitions (2) => 180.777 MB

- Real capacity FAT32 partition (1) => 9.991 MB

Free:

- NTFS partitions (2) => 149.672 MB

- FAT32 partition (1) => 2.966 MB

- TOTAL: => 152.638 MB

Data written => 10,67 GB

Time elapsed => 00

= 14,99 MB/sec

So:

- free space => 152.638 MB

- data written => 10,67 GB

I'm wondering if that's a normal result?

Progress bar useless => directly 100%

cj_staal

yeah, mine didn't wipe anything also

rationalmind

Excellent update! I am glad to confirm that in v1.5.2.336, Disk Wiper works great at amazing speed! Thanks much for fixing that great feature!!

tullik

Ran Disk Wiper six times for free space only.

Results:

1. M:\...external USB hard disk...NTFS...free space=77.3 GB...DW wrote 6.87 GB in 8 minutes

2. K:\...internal SATA hard disk...NTFS...free space=115 GB...DW wrote 0 GB in 0 minutes

3. L:\...external USB hard disk...NTFS...free space=74.4 GB...DW wrote 0 GB in 0 minutes

4. M:\...external USB hard disk...NTFS...free space=77.3 GB...DW wrote 6.87 GB in 8 minutes -- same device as in 1 above.

5. D:\...internal SATA hard disk...NTFS...free space=88.1 GB...DW wrote 28.3 MB in 30 seconds

6. N:\...USB stick...FAT...free space=200 MB...DW wrote 1001 MB in 21.4 minutes

Observations and questions:

In 1./4., the GB DW wrote were less than 9% of the free space. In 5., the GB DW wrote were less than 0.04% of the free space. How does that make sense?

In 2. and 3., DW cleared the free space instantaneously while writing nothing. How is that possible?

In 6., DW wrote enough to cover the free space five times. It took longer to wipe the 200 MB on this FAT device than the 440 GB on the NTFS hard disks. Is NTFS really that much more efficient than FAT? ... :)

stever

My concern after watching this thread is how I will ever be able to trust this product. Clearly there is no unit testing or QA department or such obvious errors would not have shipped.

If the disk wiper starts taking a sensible amount of time and reporting reasonable numbers, what will that mean? Only that the obvious errors a user can notice are gone. Without unit testing or QA, it might be wiping the same segment a billion times and the rest none. We would never know.

redseujac

I think JV should give us finally the needed information after having read carefully all the posts in this thread (topic).

The "results" of the Disk Wiper are very weird and obscure for us users :

mallet

hi all !

wiping free space doesn't work here too !

Win XP + all updates, NTFS formated drives

bye

tullik

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jv16

Steve R wrote
My concern after watching this thread is how I will ever be able to trust this product. Clearly there is no unit testing or QA department or such obvious errors would not have shipped.

The problem doesn't always occur, only with some systems. Therefore QA nor unit testing (which we do have, btw) can't detect this kind of problem.

If you can't trust a product that has one or more bugs, I'm curious to know what products you are using? You can't be using Windows, for example, since it's full of bugs, there's bugs in MacOS and linux as well, so have you perhaps created your own bug-free operating system which you can trust?