Wide swings in Time Left for ATI2019 Disk Cleaner
Using ATI2019 Disk Cleaner for the first time on an old laptop.
During the 16 hours that its been running, the Time Left has changed many times, first 5hrs, then 11hrs, then 3hrs, then 7hrs, and until a few minutes ago, 1hr26min. It just changed to 10hrs.
What's triggering the wide swings in Time Left?
Now, after 30 hours running, the green bar is at about 50% and Time Left now reads 10 hours.
I cancelled the job and exited via the open command prompt.
The laptop rebooted and I signed on to an apparently intact system.
This calls into question ALL of ATI2019.
I'm going to reformat be some other means and attempt to restore a validated full backup from the ATI2019 Backup/Restore on an external drive with the Survival Kit installed on this "sandbox" laptop.
I'll report the results.
Jim, what exactly are you wanting to do here?
Acronis Drive Cleanser is something I can't remember ever using other than just to look at the options it offers, but I see it as primarily a data security application for secure erasing of data that you do not want anyone else to be able to recover.
If you are just wanting to clean off all the data from the old laptop in anticipation of doing a recovery / restore of an Acronis backup image to it later, then there is no need for doing a full secure erase of the drive.
The 'Add New Disk' feature of the Acronis Rescue Media can erase and reformat the target drive prior to recovering to it, or else if you have either a Windows boot disc or USB stick, or a Windows PE version of the Acronis rescue media, you can open a Command Prompt window and use the Windows diskpart command to do the same very quickly.
The commands needed would be:
diskpart
list disk (to identify the installed disk drives - look for the size of drives shown)
select disk x (where x is the correct drive by number)
clean (this will completely wipe the drive and remove all partitions etc!).
You could practise this on a spare USB drive / stick to see how it works - I use it when preparing USB sticks for using as rescue media.
Preparing USB drive for use by Acronis using Diskpart
diskpart
list disk (to identify USB drive, i.e. 1)
select disk 1
clean
create partition primary
active
format fs=fat32 quick
assign
exit