Paul Coddington
July 23rd, 2005, 12:16 AM
It must be nearly a year since I reported 4 serious bugs with the Privacy Expert suite:
1. Cluster Tips not being erased by PE.
2. PE Disk Wipe crash about 80% through scan (the C++ runtime was asked to terminate in an unusual way).
3. Boot CD-ROMs of Drive Cleanser treat RAID disks as ordinary disks without any checks or warnings and trash all partitions and the entire disk set while attempting to erase a single partition.
4. Selection of custom files and folders for secure erase does not work properly (PE) - folders and files are not independant and no wildcards are accepted even though they should be.
As some updates have been recently released, I spend some time trying them out last night and the latest version of Privacy Expert is still crashing, at which point I gave up. (I am obviously not going to test Drive Cleanser again - it is too much work repairing an entire system after having the RAID set trashed).
Although it is possible to erase the 20Gb C: partition with PE, it is not possible to erase the 360GB D: partition without a crash (these are on a SATA RAID 0 set). No DrWatson logs are produced by this crash (the log is empty and there is no mini dump).
Fortunately TrueImage does not seem to have any problems, but it concerns me that I have had a license for Privacy Expert for more than enough time for the issues to be addressed (the good part of a year), and there still seems to be no hope of having a product that works as advertised. I also note that others have reported the same problems (as evidenced by searches of this forum and Google).
In fact, there appears to be no evidence that bug reports are processed and addressed - we have new builds, but the bugs are still there, and there is no publication of the changes since the last build (so we have to waste time trying it out rather than seeing that our bugs are not addressed yet).
On top of this, I note that others raising similar questions on the forum are being met with what appear to be deliberately evasive answers (or answers from an automated process pretending to be human which ignore the issues raised completely).
1. Cluster Tips not being erased by PE.
2. PE Disk Wipe crash about 80% through scan (the C++ runtime was asked to terminate in an unusual way).
3. Boot CD-ROMs of Drive Cleanser treat RAID disks as ordinary disks without any checks or warnings and trash all partitions and the entire disk set while attempting to erase a single partition.
4. Selection of custom files and folders for secure erase does not work properly (PE) - folders and files are not independant and no wildcards are accepted even though they should be.
As some updates have been recently released, I spend some time trying them out last night and the latest version of Privacy Expert is still crashing, at which point I gave up. (I am obviously not going to test Drive Cleanser again - it is too much work repairing an entire system after having the RAID set trashed).
Although it is possible to erase the 20Gb C: partition with PE, it is not possible to erase the 360GB D: partition without a crash (these are on a SATA RAID 0 set). No DrWatson logs are produced by this crash (the log is empty and there is no mini dump).
Fortunately TrueImage does not seem to have any problems, but it concerns me that I have had a license for Privacy Expert for more than enough time for the issues to be addressed (the good part of a year), and there still seems to be no hope of having a product that works as advertised. I also note that others have reported the same problems (as evidenced by searches of this forum and Google).
In fact, there appears to be no evidence that bug reports are processed and addressed - we have new builds, but the bugs are still there, and there is no publication of the changes since the last build (so we have to waste time trying it out rather than seeing that our bugs are not addressed yet).
On top of this, I note that others raising similar questions on the forum are being met with what appear to be deliberately evasive answers (or answers from an automated process pretending to be human which ignore the issues raised completely).