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Drive Cleanser never finishes

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Hi,

I'm trying to clean several 1 TB HDD with Drive Cleanser contained in TI2021.

I made several attempts with different data destruction algorithms and different connectivity (i.e. in a drive bay and with an USB adapter). I left the cleanser running for days, but the process would never finish. It always gets stuck at 100 % (progress bar is full) with remaining time something under one minute. The acivity LED keeps flshing all the time.

What may be the problem here? Can I abort the process and assume the drive is clean? This is really frustrating.

 

Regards, Enrico

0 Users found this helpful

Enrico, welcome to these public User Forums.

I have never used the Acronis Drive Cleanser feature so have no direct experience of using this.

Any utility doing this type of forensic data destruction will take a long time to complete but this shouldn't be as long as needing many days as you are saying here!

Personally, for the majority of users with no need to fear the discovery of criminal data stored on their drives, then these tools are overkill, and it would be sufficient to reformat the drive using normal partition manager tools, i.e. reformat the drive to different types of partition formats such as exFAT, NTFS, EXT4 etc and if offered use the option to write zeros across the whole drive.

For your current situation, I would suggest doing a normal shutdown of your PC where Drive Cleanser is running and let this terminate the operation that has been running for days, then after restarting Windows, download a copy of the free MiniTool Partition Wizard software and use this to check the status of the drives you were cleaning.