[SOLVED] "Used space" remains after wiping hard drive

Netherspark

Reputable
Feb 11, 2016
84
1
4,640
After wiping my hard drive in CCleaner there was initially still 230MB of "used space", which has now increased to over 300MB, even though there's literally nothing on the drive. SpaceSniffer shows it as "Unaccessible Space", and the CCleaner analysis tool just calls it "Other Files". I cannot see anything on the drive at all.

I've wiped the disk clean, formatted it, deleted the volumes. Nothing I do gets rid of it.

What's going on with this?
 
Solution
I'm not sure, but looking at the documentation for DiskWipe, it says that it only wipes Windows partitions, so it is almost certainly not erasing the whole disk.

There are several wipe programs on hddguru.com. Take a look at http://hddguru.com/software/Wipe-My-Disks/

Do be careful with it - it looks like it erases all the disks in the system by default - maybe unplug any disks that you want to preserve.

Good luck.
It looks like CCleaner only erases files, not the entire disk.

Grab DBAN or something similar that will flatten everything - boot records, partition tables, etc.

You don't need the multi-pass options, just one pass will be enough unless you are selling or giving away the drive.
 

Netherspark

Reputable
Feb 11, 2016
84
1
4,640
It looks like CCleaner only erases files, not the entire disk.

Grab DBAN or something similar that will flatten everything - boot records, partition tables, etc.

You don't need the multi-pass options, just one pass will be enough unless you are selling or giving away the drive.

I couldn't get DBAN to work, it just refused to run. I tried DiskWipe instead and made no difference.
 
I'm not sure, but looking at the documentation for DiskWipe, it says that it only wipes Windows partitions, so it is almost certainly not erasing the whole disk.

There are several wipe programs on hddguru.com. Take a look at http://hddguru.com/software/Wipe-My-Disks/

Do be careful with it - it looks like it erases all the disks in the system by default - maybe unplug any disks that you want to preserve.

Good luck.
 
Solution