[Winpt-users] File wipe options

Alan Jones alan at ajsquared.us
Thu May 4 04:57:51 CEST 2006


For those that want may want more secure erasing another product to
consider is Eraser

http://www.heidi.ie/eraser/
it is also GPL

Timo Schulz wrote:
> On Wed May 03 2006; 12:53, Roger Carr wrote:
>
>   
>> I wasn't able to find any documentation on the file wipe option 
>> "Simple".  Can anyone tell me what is done when using this default option?  
>>     
>
> Overwrite file with 2 random passes.
>
>   
>   
>> I saw some old release notes that listed the wipe options as 
>> "experimental"..  Are they still considered experimental?  
>>     
>
> I'm not sure where you read this. But it is a well known problem
> to delete data securely from hard disks. The file is overwritten
> with random data but due to disk caches and other (technical issues)
> there is still a risk that some portions of the file remain in
> unscrambled on the hard disk.
> (Peter Gutmann published an excellent paper about this problem)
>
>   
>> One final question.  When selecting the "Wipe Free Space" option, does 
>> a dialog box come up asking you which drive to perform the operation on?
>> I didn't want to try this until I knew what it was going to do.
>>     
>
> The command does exactly what the description is saying. It wipes
> out the free space of the selected hard disk. 
>
> The current code uses a simple "trick" to achieve this. It creates
> a temporary file and the size of this file is equal to the free disk
> space(*). Then this file is overwritten with random pattern and at the
> end the file is deleted. The only risk _could be_ that the temp file
> remains on the disk and there is no free disk space. But WinPT tries
> to delete the file whenever the procedure is cancelled.
>
>
>    Timo
>    
>
> p.s.
> The code has a major problem on XP/NTFS. In general a user can't wipe
> out the free space due to restrctions (quotas, privileges). The new
> 0.12.0 version (not yet released) provides code to check the
> privileges of  the current user.
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>
>
>   


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