Erasing Paging (Swap) File
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Windows NT (and 2000) has a security feature that will overwrite the paging file at shutdown. The overwriting is done by the operating system after all applications are closed so most data will be overwritten. There are small areas that cannot be accessed because they are allocated by the operating system components that are still active. You may enable this feature from the General Preferences window of Eraser.
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The overwriting of the paging file on Windows 9x is a more complicated task and should only be done by those who know what they are doing.
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If you want to do the erasing from Windows, you will need to disable the virtual memory from the Control Panel and then use Eraser to overwrite the unused space on the drive where the paging file was. Disabling virtual memory may cause your computer to run out of memory and possibly stop responding, so you should not run any other applications before enabling the virtual memory again.
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A better method is to set the paging file to a fixed size from Control Panel and use a command line file erasing utility to overwrite the swap file from DOS. You can find a suitable DOS file wiper, eraserd.exe, from the directory where you have Eraser installed.
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Just boot to DOS mode (this means shutting down Windows), or boot your computer from a floppy disk, and move to the directory where you have eraserd.exe (usually C:\Program Files\Eraser), and run the following command
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eraserd -file C:\win386.swp -passes 3
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If you swap file is not located in the root directory, use the correct path to swap file instead. You can increase or decrease the number of overwriting passes if you want.
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