Other Norton Products

[Jimn]

Does the MFT cleanup/bleach function in Speed disk Norton Utilities v15 really work??  I ran the recovery of deleted files and it found 55,000 + files eligible for recovery before I stopped it.  Ran the MFT bleach/cleanup/elimination of deleted records – which ran in a second or less.  Booted my laptop.  Ran the recovery of deleted files and it found 55,000 + files before I stopped it again.  So I’m saying the MFT bleach/cleanup/elimination of deleted records DOES NOT WORK?  Has anyone tried this and found that it does work?

[PapauZ Norton Fighter]

Hi,

you must "turn on" the Bleach feature before running it.

Did you checked that checkbox previously?

[Jimn]

Yes I did.  Also after the first bleach action(box was checked) I ran another product to zero out(hex 0's) free space and ran the recovery of deleted files a second time.  The second time came up with the same number of files eligible to be recovered before I cancelled it.

[PapauZ Norton Fighter]

Can you please give us some extra info:

- Which Windows OS and Service Pack do you use?

- What is your current security product on the machine?

- In which format is your partiotion formatted (FAT32, NTFS)?

- How big the partion is?

Thanks.

[Jimn]

Windows 7 Professional (x64) Service Pack 1

Norton 360 Premier Edition

NTFS

309 GB

[PapauZ Norton Fighter]

Maybe it's a stupid question, but did you restarted the PC after the bleaching?

As on the picture you can see, a reboot is required to clean the Master File Table records.

[Jimn]

Yes I did reboot.  Can you look at any log files to see/verify steps taken?  Run in a debug mode?

[DaveH]

What was the other program you used that also didn't work?

Dave

[Jimn]

Dave -

The other program is Migo Digital Shredder 4 Premium.  I believe that worked as it ran for 12 hours and the disk activity light was on that whole time and you can hear disk activity.  It end normally with no error messages.

The reason why I'm saying that is that does the Recover deleted files function search the MFT for deleted files and when you attempt to recover one of those deleted files  it can't recover it as the actual data is over written?  To me it looks like the delete of the actual MFT record of the deleted file is never BLEACHED and when you run the recover function again you get the record showing up in the MFT.  BTW - I used the DEEP SCAN in the recover function - as the quick scan comes up with zero files found.

[PapauZ Norton Fighter]

Norton Utilities 15's Bleaching function works this way: it do not writes 0s to every free segment on the HDD, it simply overwrites the free space with blank data files, this way recovering any data is impossible with standard recovery methods (like with software recovery tools).

Why you can stil see files? It is because you did checked the files via Deep Scan. There's almost 0% chance to restore any of those files NU15 can see. If anything can be recoverd it will just some random bytes... Nobody will be able to read them.