I've been an user of Wipe & Clean for many years. I am selling a couple of my older computers and for the first time put the disk free space wipe to use.
After restoring these computers to the factory image using their OEM utilities I installed Wipe and Clean to wipe the free space. I'm using version 9.6 on a PC with Windows 7 Home Premium 64bit. I selected the DoD 3 pass algorithm. I let it run overnight.
On a whim I decided to check the results using the latest R-Undelete free home edition. As expected I saw nothing to restore on the standard scan. But when I ran the detailed scan I was quite surprised to see filenames for my financial documents and names of other documents that included my name in the original titles! I was not able to recover any of these files but the filenames having my name in them are what concerns me. Why are these not wiped?
I re-ran the wipe 2 more times using again the DoD 3 pass as well as just the plain zeros pass. The results from R-Undelete reduce each time but I'm still seeing document filenames discovered on the detailed scan that I do not want there.
R-Wipe & Clean with R-Undelete
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Discussion on the R-Wipe & Clean and R-Crypto software
Discussion on the R-Wipe & Clean and R-Crypto software
Re: R-Wipe & Clean with R-Undelete
Did you select Wipe Master File Table Records on the Disks and Files Settings tab?
Re: R-Wipe & Clean with R-Undelete
Yep, it's checked by default of course.
I've done some further testing on this and R-Wipe 9.6 definitely does not fully wipe out the MFT table on Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit for AHCI SATA drives 1TB and higher. I got worried about this having trusted R-Wipe for many many years and sunk in the last few days testing before I let these two PCs go that I sold on Craigslist. I am seeing that there's always plain text unscrambled filenames left behind after free space wipes for any files that were deleted outside of R-Wipe (stuff like uninstalls or just deleting a folder via windows explorer or emptying the recyle bin normally). The expectation though is a free space wipe will zap all of these.
I've tried a 1TB and a 1.5TB drive (both rently purchased Seagate Barracuda 7200s) with the same results as the 1TB Seagates in the PCs being sold. Install Windows 7 and some various programs, do some work with them to generate some data. Do some uninstalls, go in and manually delete some data folders using Windows Explorer. Defrag the drive, Chkdsk /f the drive, R-Wipe the free space (using either psuedo random or DoD 3 pass doesn't matter), reboot. Should be pristine. But check the drive with R-Undelete detailed scan and there are *many* of the deleted filenames uncovered plain as day. Folder names are gone, file contents are unrecoverable - but many filenames persist unaltered complete with their original file extensions. Granted they are not 100% all found but the above steps still netted me 182 filenames in only 20 minutes of detailed scanning with R-Undelete. All it takes is one filename with a name or address in it though and you're now know to a stranger. Not cool at all.
I've done some further testing on this and R-Wipe 9.6 definitely does not fully wipe out the MFT table on Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit for AHCI SATA drives 1TB and higher. I got worried about this having trusted R-Wipe for many many years and sunk in the last few days testing before I let these two PCs go that I sold on Craigslist. I am seeing that there's always plain text unscrambled filenames left behind after free space wipes for any files that were deleted outside of R-Wipe (stuff like uninstalls or just deleting a folder via windows explorer or emptying the recyle bin normally). The expectation though is a free space wipe will zap all of these.
I've tried a 1TB and a 1.5TB drive (both rently purchased Seagate Barracuda 7200s) with the same results as the 1TB Seagates in the PCs being sold. Install Windows 7 and some various programs, do some work with them to generate some data. Do some uninstalls, go in and manually delete some data folders using Windows Explorer. Defrag the drive, Chkdsk /f the drive, R-Wipe the free space (using either psuedo random or DoD 3 pass doesn't matter), reboot. Should be pristine. But check the drive with R-Undelete detailed scan and there are *many* of the deleted filenames uncovered plain as day. Folder names are gone, file contents are unrecoverable - but many filenames persist unaltered complete with their original file extensions. Granted they are not 100% all found but the above steps still netted me 182 filenames in only 20 minutes of detailed scanning with R-Undelete. All it takes is one filename with a name or address in it though and you're now know to a stranger. Not cool at all.
Re: R-Wipe & Clean with R-Undelete
We're trying to reproduce the problem.
Was the System Restore enabled during the operation?
Was the System Restore enabled during the operation?