Cipher and compressed drives

[dan n]

for various reasons this firm is interested in being sure
that data cannot be recovered from deleted sectors but is
not particularly interested in encrypted drives (long
story) So they have a policy of running cipher.exe :w on
drives as a scheduled task to blank out the deleted
sectors. Recently we had to convert a usb2-attached hard
disk to a compressed drive and cipher.exe :w stopped
working. Is this a general problem with cipher or is
there some additional options or settings which need to be
changed.

 

[Drew Cooper [MSFT]]

To the best of my knowledge, we (MSFT) don't support NTFS on any flash
media, thus no support for EFS or the cipher cmdline tool. (I'm supposed to
say stuff like that.)

What do you mean "stopped working"? I wasn't aware of any problems like
that and I'd love to get more details. What's the command line you're
using? And what behavior do (or maybe "don't") you see? Is this on XP?

 

[Guest]

The device is an actual hard drive, not flash media. The
error message is

Access denied

The command is

C:\Windows\System32\cipher.exe /w:f:\temporary

where f:\temporary is a folder on the usb hard disk.

-----Original Message-----
To the best of my knowledge, we (MSFT) don't support NTFS on any flash
media, thus no support for EFS or the cipher cmdline tool. (I'm supposed to
say stuff like that.)

What do you mean "stopped working"? I wasn't aware of any problems like
that and I'd love to get more details. What's the command line you're
using? And what behavior do (or maybe "don't") you see? Is this on XP?
--
Drew Cooper [MSFT]
This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.

for various reasons this firm is interested in being sure
that data cannot be recovered from deleted sectors but is
not particularly interested in encrypted drives (long
story) So they have a policy of running cipher.exe :w on
drives as a scheduled task to blank out the deleted
sectors. Recently we had to convert a usb2-attached hard
disk to a compressed drive and cipher.exe :w stopped
working. Is this a general problem with cipher or is
there some additional options or settings which need to be
changed.

.