Disk Director 11 Workstation: Search feature not working?
I used DD 10 as a forensic tool that quickly and accurately could located key words and text on client hard drives. With the new version 11, search is totally not working, and worse, gives dozens of false positives, so at this point it's worthless to me, and a waste of money.
Here's an example: I zero-filled an old 4gig Seagate, initialized and formatted it.
Created a small text file named Test.txt on clean drive.
In DD 11 I selected that volume and went to search for that file name. No results.
I then searched for a known word in the text file. No results.
How can this be?
Should I just dump DD 11 and go back to DD workstation 10? Despite the claims that it won't work on Windows 7, I used it for months with success until someone pointed out "it doesn't work on 7 so upgrade to 11."
Any assistance is greatly appreciated, as I have had to use another manufacturer's hex editor while this is being worked out. I'm not sure if a screen shot is even useful.

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Thanks for the reply Colin. I did another test this morning and here's what happened.
Created text file that contained words "now is the time". See attached screen cap Search1. That phrase is shown as being in a section of zero filled sectors.
Another phrase in the text file was "lack of interest". Search did not find those words at all.
Next I created a new text file and filled it with multiple lines of "This is a test of how well BCWipe deletes data."
Searching for "BCWipe deletes" yielded the results seen in Search2 attachment. Notice that DD did not hit on the actual text when it first found it, but continued on to another zero data area. This is confusing!
Any thoughts on what is going on? I was careful to select the actual partition as opposed to the disk #.
Thanks again,
Scott
As an afterthought, I went back and a search for "lack of interest" and this time it got a hit, but again, not in the first area it was found. Looking at attachment 3 you can see that it ran past the phrase, then stopped on an area that I don't think is really that phrase.
Attachment | Size |
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63771-95341.jpg | 247.89 KB |
63771-95344.jpg | 194.34 KB |
63771-95347.jpg | 196.52 KB |
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Has anyone figured out why my search results are not accurate? As per my previous post the search feature is skipping over instances of the search text and finding what appears to be unrelated data but flagging it as the search term. I really need to get some confidence that DD 11 (and it is confirmed to be V11 upgraded from 10) is working correctly, as it is certainly not as good as 10.
Thanks!
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Scott,
I haven't been able to replicate your problem, but I just realised I've been checking out a fixed disk whereas you are using a USB based one. I wonder if that is where the difference lies?
It might be worth sending a question to the presales support desk.
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I just tested on a USB flash drive and it appears to be highlighting the "find" one sector higher than where it actually is. Same thing happened when searching a drive. Both tests were run in a VM.
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