DriveForge: download ældre versioner

![DriveForge](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ForgeLabsSoft/driveforge/v4.5.1/logo-256.png)

## v4.5.1 — 2026-10-17

The same audit, carried on into the screens 4.5.0 did not reach — and this time every fix was measured on
real hardware before and after, not read. Nineteen changes, no new features: **updating is safe from any
4.x, and nothing here changes a file format or a saved setting.**

Two faults in here could have cost someone data. Both were found the same way: by asking the app to do the
dangerous thing and then checking the disk itself, rather than believing the dialog.

### Fixed — a drive erased that you never chose

• **The scheduled clone offered to erase a drive it was never scheduled for.** With a 1 GB drive scheduled
and a second drive of the same model name connected, the next start announced *"The drive your scheduled
clone writes to is connected: … 32.0 MB … It ERASES this drive"* — a different disk entirely, already
selected, one Yes away from being formatted. The offer matched on the model name alone and took the first
hit, ignoring the size and serial number recorded in the very command line it had just read. The
unattended run refuses to guess in exactly that situation; the offer guessed. Both now ask the same
question in the same place, and the offer stays quiet when it cannot be certain.
• **"Is this my drive?" was answered with a tolerance wider than most drives.** The size had to be within
1 GiB — flat — so a 32 MB disk passed for a 1 GB one and the unattended run took it as its target. It
survived only because Windows does not fit on 32 MB. The margin is now one percent of the recorded size,
never more than 64 MiB.
• **Two names for one file were offered as two copies.** The duplicate finder counted directory entries
where it had to measure distinct storage: a hard-linked pair came back as a "duplicate set" and pushed the
reclaimable total up by a whole file, when deleting either name frees nothing at all. Both finders — exact
and "similar photos" — now compare the volume serial and file index.
• **The protected folder only counted if you picked it before the scan.** Choose it afterwards and the rule
ticked your master copy red and kept a different one. The deletion itself re-read the box and spared the
file, so the screen and the deed disagreed, and "keep 1 per set" quietly became keep 2.

### Fixed — what the app did behind your back

• **Cleaning traces swept away the code the app was running on.** A single-file .exe unpacks part of itself
into the temporary folder and runs from there; "Temporary files" cleared it out, and the next shutdown
threw `DllNotFoundException`. Reported by a user, reproduced here byte-for-byte, and it would have
happened on every clean. The sweep now leaves that folder alone — for any single-file program on the PC,
not only this one.
• **A fault while the app was closing was dressed up as a lost operation.** The dialog said DriveForge "had
to stop the current operation" and invited a bug report, after the work had finished and the window was
already gone. It is written to the log now, where it belongs.
• **Building one drive rewrote the host machine's disk policy.** The setting was changed to get the work
done and never put back.
• **Windows-To-Go read four of its options after the image was already written.** Whatever you ticked, four
of them could not affect the drive you got.

### Fixed — tools that refused work they could do

• **Resize and Delete asked diskpart, which answered 0 and then refused everything.** On a virtual disk
diskpart reports no shrinkable space and `delete volume override` fails with "The system cannot find the
file specified", leaving the partition where it was — while Windows' own partition API does both. Each now
asks Windows first and keeps diskpart as the fallback, and a refusal is no longer reported as a crash.
• **Every 64 GB stick was refused, under a number the image never needed.**
• **The signature gate on the multi-boot engine could

A screen-by-screen audit of the whole application, driven on real hardware rather than read.
Thirty-eight changes, and nearly all of them are one fault in different clothes: the app knew
something and did not say it. Nothing here changes a file format or a saved setting.

A run now reports what it actually did. A clone could take back three of the four options it had
offered you, into the log alone. Writing an image to several drives reported "6 of 6 written" when
it had refused two of them, and also dropped drives that vanished while the confirmation was up and
ticks with no drive connected. "Windows is keeping this disk offline" reached one report out of two.
A read-only file-system scan could call a drive healthy, as could Create partition and Delete volume,
which decided their verdict from a variable set to true and never lowered. The speed test spent 80 MB
and spoke for the whole drive; the disk-space analyser counted the Recycle Bin as free space. Clean
traces reported a stopped run as a finished one and a plain delete as a secure wipe, and named
sanitising standards it does not implement.

Screens that hid the thing they exist for. Recover would not list the one volume it exists for.
Cleanup gave four different answers to "what is on screen". Three finished tools had no button
anywhere. The file-system menu stopped repeating the 32 GB FAT32 limit, which was measured to be
wrong, and now asks rather than refusing.

Stop is answered as a Stop on every path behind the Start button; several treated it as a failure,
and one saved a log file to the Desktop on the way out.

Download an ISO: "Get latest" for Ubuntu was two LTS releases behind and could not have caught up,
with 24.04 written into the entry three times over. It now reads Ubuntu's release server and takes
the newest LTS. Reported by Keith Weisshar. The SHA-256 check is now offered where a download
finishes, which is the one screen that did not have it.

Also: the step numbers are gone from the interface, sentences that point at a button now name it,
and 46 of the 84 error sentences a person could see are translated, along with four dialogs that
were English end to end - including the one shown before erasing a drive.

Fixed: on a plain USB flash drive, a drive could be emptied and then told the operation had failed.

Every destructive tool starts with the same command, and on a plain flash drive Windows often refuses it
with "Access is denied" - after the partition table is already gone. The tool then showed a hexadecimal
error code and created nothing, so the drive was left blank and the message explained nothing. Eleven
places started with that command, among them the SSD erase, Format, the full-overwrite Wipe and writing
an ISO to a stick.

They all now look at the disk instead of reading an exit code, and finish the job: when the partition
table is already gone they carry on, otherwise they try two further routes before stopping. If all of
them fail, the message says in plain language that nothing new was created and that unplugging the drive
and trying again usually clears it.

Four more faults in the same chain were found the same way and fixed: an emptied disk that still reported
its old partition table could never be given a new one; a drive that cannot TRIM failed the whole erase;
a partition that was created but not formatted was abandoned with no file system on it; and the progress
line called a flash drive an SSD immediately after warning that it is not one.

All of it was measured by driving the application on a real flash drive, and the erase was then run
through it four times from end to end.

Fixed: erasing an SSD could empty the drive and then stop, leaving it blank and uninitialised with only
an error code to explain it. Reported by a user on Windows 11 26H2.

DriveForge was asking Windows to convert a partition table that the erase had just removed, so there was
nothing to convert. It now creates the table with the call meant for a blank disk, and then checks that it
got one; if Windows refuses, the message says the drive is blank rather than broken, in your own language.

If this happened to you, the drive is not damaged. Initialise it from DriveForge's Partition tools,
"Initialize a blank / RAW disk", or from Windows Disk Management, and it is a normal empty drive again.

The same mistake was found in two more places while fixing the first - creating a bootable VHDX, and the
Windows-To-Go layout - and both are fixed. Two tests now fail the build if it is ever reintroduced.

A few sentences in the program point you at another task by name - "...you can restore it back to a drive later
with 'Restore image'". The name was written into the sentence, so the sentence was translated into all sixteen
languages and the name was not: in Romanian the text sent you to 'Restore image' while the button beside it read
'Restaurează imagine', and in Japanese to a label that was not on screen at all. Those sentences now carry a
reference to the task rather than its name, filled in from the same text the sidebar puts on the button, so the
two cannot disagree again - including after a rename.

This also carries everything from 4.4.1, which was not published here, so upgrading from 4.4.0 brings all of it:

- Choosing a base colour while in Light mode made the window unreadable - near-black panels under near-black
text - and "Reset to default" painted the panels in exactly the text colour. The only way out was a restart.
- Start-up overwrote your saved theme and accent with the defaults on every launch, so any appearance choice
survived exactly one restart. The window looked right for that session, which is why it never looked wrong.
- Drive health was decided by reading the drive's translated health label for the English word "OK", so the
three languages that properly translate it - Chinese, Japanese and Hindi - reported healthy drives as failing
and advised replacing them. Nothing was ever blocked and no data was at risk; the damage was the advice.
- The language list is in an order again: English first, then alphabetical by the name you actually read.
- The program opens on "Create Windows USB" rather than a clone task, so a destructive operation is no longer
the one under the cursor at launch.
- Sixteen translations still described an older, smaller recovery tool - NTFS only, no disk images, no preview.
- Changing language no longer blanks the Drive tools card, nor leaves the health trend note, the Clean total or
the Recover result in the language you just left.
- The About box had been reporting the wrong version since 4.4.0; it now comes from the build itself.

New: write one image to several drives, one after another. Each drive is erased, written, verified and put
back before the next begins, so no more than one disk is ever offline. The confirmation lists every drive by
name, size and current contents, and will not start until you tick a box naming the number of drives. Each
drive gets its own result at the end rather than one verdict for the batch.

The rest of this release is what running every function against real hardware found, and then fixing it:

- A failure to write the boot record is explained in words in all five flows that write one, including both
restore paths, instead of a raw exit code and sixty lines of trace.
- A restore no longer ends by announcing "USB creation finished", no longer lists options the mode never
applies in the last dialog before the disk is erased, and estimates its remaining time from the image's own
content size rather than a multiplier.
- A finished operation's progress row no longer follows you to every other page, and the progress bar no
longer walks backwards at the end of a long copy.
- Secure shred no longer reports that it overwrote a gigabyte when it overwrote three megabytes.
- The multi-boot drive picker marks the disks in its list that are not removable drives.
- Changing language no longer erases the result a failed or stopped run left on screen, and two languages had
words written in the wrong alphabet.

Proven end to end on real drives: this PC backed up to an 88.6 GB image, restored onto a blank disk and
booted; the VHDX export attaches and carries a complete Windows; Ventoy installs, takes an ISO and boots.

# Changelog

All notable changes to DriveForge are documented here. Dates are ISO (YYYY-MM-DD).

## v4.3.3 — 2026-09-28

### Fixed
• **A failed operation no longer leaves the progress bar claiming it is still working.** When one ended with an
error, the bar kept its last percentage and the line beneath it went on advertising a "Remaining" time that
would never move again — directly above the dialog explaining the failure, with the Windows taskbar still
showing a green progress bar underneath. The row is now cleared the moment the failure is known, before the
dialog appears, and the elapsed time it reports is how long the work actually ran rather than how long the
dialog was left on screen. This covers recovering files, recovering into a zip, imaging a drive, the surface
test, exporting a bootable VHDX, moving a partition on both MBR and GPT disks, scanning for lost partitions,
and setting up multi-boot.
• **A failed multi-boot setup no longer leaves "Setting up multi-boot engine on Disk N..." on screen** — including
when it stops for a reason that is not an error at all：the target disk changing identity while the engine is
still downloading.
• **An operation that keeps its progress bar after a failure no longer quotes a "Remaining" time beside it.**
Wiping, shredding, backing up, writing an image and the capacity test deliberately leave the bar where the
failure found it — on a destructive operation that number is the only thing on screen saying how far the write
got — but the estimate next to it was still being calculated, and froze into a countdown that would never move.
The bar stays; the estimate goes.
• **Two exits that are not errors no longer leave the app saying it is working.** Writing an image and formatting
both stop before they start if the target drive turns out to have changed identity in the meantime; the status
line survived that, and for formatting it survived a completed run too.

### Under the hood
• **Every build warning is gone — 299 of them, down to zero, with nothing about the app changed.** Most (288)
were nullable annotations sitting in files that had no nullable context; the project now switches that context on
without switching on the nullable warnings, which makes the existing annotations legal without moving a single line
of code. The rest were genuine leftovers：the WindowsDesktop SDK reference that has not been needed for years, two
failure flags that were set and then never read, a progress-throttle field that had lost its reader, an always-zero
addend in the file-carving size table, and a deliberately fire-and-forget screen update that now says so out loud.
Each site was first examined for a missing check hiding behind the warning, rather than simply silenced — and the two
real defects that search turned up are left for their own fix, since they change behaviour.

## v4.3.2 — 2026-09-17

### Fixed — a regression in v4.3.1
• **Secure shred stopped erasing OneDrive, deduplicated and CompactOS-compressed files.** The v4.3.1 fix that
stopped shred following symbolic links tested the wrong thing：the "reparse point" attribute marks a whole
family of files, not just links, and OneDrive Files On-Demand placeholders, NTFS-deduplicated files and
CompactOS-compressed files all carry it while being perfectly ordinary files. Shredding a folder of them
reported "Nothing selected"; in a mixed folder they were left out of every count and then deleted without
being overwritten, while the summary said the folder had been securely erased. Only genuine symbolic links
and junctions are skipped now, and one picked directly is reported as skipped rather than silently dropped.
• **Stop no longer hangs the streaming clone.** Stopping it broke the pipe between the two copy processes and
left one of them waiting forever, so the operation never ended.
• **Stop works when the step it was going to interrupt has just finished.** It previously did nothing at all in
that case — the operation carried on with no sign the button h

# Changelog

All notable changes to DriveForge are documented here. Dates are ISO (YYYY-MM-DD).

## v4.3.2 — 2026-09-17

### Fixed — a regression in v4.3.1
• **Secure shred stopped erasing OneDrive, deduplicated and CompactOS-compressed files.** The v4.3.1 fix that
stopped shred following symbolic links tested the wrong thing：the "reparse point" attribute marks a whole
family of files, not just links, and OneDrive Files On-Demand placeholders, NTFS-deduplicated files and
CompactOS-compressed files all carry it while being perfectly ordinary files. Shredding a folder of them
reported "Nothing selected"; in a mixed folder they were left out of every count and then deleted without
being overwritten, while the summary said the folder had been securely erased. Only genuine symbolic links
and junctions are skipped now, and one picked directly is reported as skipped rather than silently dropped.
• **Stop no longer hangs the streaming clone.** Stopping it broke the pipe between the two copy processes and
left one of them waiting forever, so the operation never ended.
• **Stop works when the step it was going to interrupt has just finished.** It previously did nothing at all in
that case — the operation carried on with no sign the button had been pressed.
• Pausing the clone no longer makes the app warn that the drive has stalled.
• A disk image you stop part-way now tells you if it also had to skip unreadable sectors.
• The progress bar during a FAT32 / exFAT recovery scan no longer jumps to 100% on the first folder.
• Switching language no longer wipes the result line left by a stopped surface test.

### New
• **The "bootable USB from an image" task now accepts raw disk images**, not just ISOs：`.img`, `.bin`,
`.raw` and `.dd` can be selected in the file picker or dropped onto the window, and dropping one switches
to that task automatically. The write engine always could do this — it copies bytes straight to the drive
without looking at the file — the file picker simply never offered them. Suggested by a user.
• The same picker no longer offers `.wim` / `.esd` for that task. They are file-level archives：written to a
drive raw they produce nothing bootable, so offering them there could only waste someone's time.

## v4.3.1 — 2026-08-31

Re-cut on 2026-08-31. The build first tagged v4.3.1 on 2026-08-30 was replaced before anyone had
downloaded it, so this tag is the only v4.3.1 that ever reached anyone. It carries everything below plus
the original v4.3.1 changes further down this section.

### Fixed — found by a code audit of everything since v4.3.0
• **The progress bar along the bottom of the window is no longer cut off by the window edge.** The bottom bar
had a fixed height that its own contents outgrew whenever the "pick a drive first" hint was showing, so the
bar's lower rounded edge was drawn past the bottom of the window and the percentage sat on what looked like a
truncated control. The bar now keeps a small margin below it, and the bottom strip grows instead of clipping
when that hint appears or wraps onto a second line in a narrow window. Cosmetic only — nothing about how an
operation runs has changed.
• **A surface test you stop part-way no longer leaves a countdown that never counts down.** The stopped scan
keeps its honest partial percentage on screen, as before, but the "Remaining" estimate beside it is now blank
instead of frozen at whatever it happened to say when you pressed Stop.
• **Resuming a deep scan starts the progress bar where the scan actually resumes.** It used to inherit the bar
from whatever ran before it, so a resume after any completed operation showed a full bar and "100%" from its
first second to its last, with no time estimate at all for the whole scan.
• **Six pieces of the window stayed in English after switching language.** The task heading at the top of the
panel, the administrator badge, and the progress line under the status text kept whatever language was active
when the app started; the two clon

# Changelog

All notable changes to DriveForge are documented here. Dates are ISO (YYYY-MM-DD).

## v4.3.1 — 2026-08-31

Re-cut on 2026-08-31. The build first tagged v4.3.1 on 2026-08-30 was replaced before anyone had
downloaded it, so this tag is the only v4.3.1 that ever reached anyone. It carries everything below plus
the original v4.3.1 changes further down this section.

### Fixed — found by a code audit of everything since v4.3.0
• **The progress bar along the bottom of the window is no longer cut off by the window edge.** The bottom bar
had a fixed height that its own contents outgrew whenever the "pick a drive first" hint was showing, so the
bar's lower rounded edge was drawn past the bottom of the window and the percentage sat on what looked like a
truncated control. The bar now keeps a small margin below it, and the bottom strip grows instead of clipping
when that hint appears or wraps onto a second line in a narrow window. Cosmetic only — nothing about how an
operation runs has changed.
• **A surface test you stop part-way no longer leaves a countdown that never counts down.** The stopped scan
keeps its honest partial percentage on screen, as before, but the "Remaining" estimate beside it is now blank
instead of frozen at whatever it happened to say when you pressed Stop.
• **Resuming a deep scan starts the progress bar where the scan actually resumes.** It used to inherit the bar
from whatever ran before it, so a resume after any completed operation showed a full bar and "100%" from its
first second to its last, with no time estimate at all for the whole scan.
• **Six pieces of the window stayed in English after switching language.** The task heading at the top of the
panel, the administrator badge, and the progress line under the status text kept whatever language was active
when the app started; the two clone-engine checkboxes ("Use the Microsoft engine (DISM)" and "Fast Clone") had
no translations at all and were English in all 17 languages. The descriptive paragraph in the Export VHDX
panel had never been translated either. All are now translated and follow a language switch immediately.
• **Buttons no longer clip their own captions in longer languages.** Nineteen buttons had a fixed width chosen
for the English text, so German "Laufwerk prüfen" rendered as "Laufwerk prü" and "Sicher entfernen" as
"Sicher entferne". They now grow to fit their caption and keep the old width as a minimum, so the layout is
unchanged in English.

### Also in v4.3.1 (from the 2026-08-30 build)

Safety fixes to confirmation dialogs, a translation fix on the recovery warning, and the project's first
automated test suite.

### Safety
• **Pressing Enter on a confirmation dialog no longer triggers the destructive action.** Nine dialogs had no
explicit default button, so Windows focused the first one — meaning Enter or Space confirmed instead of
cancelling. Affected：erase free space, capacity test, grow/create partition, set active partition, test boot
(which takes the disk offline and boots a guest OS that writes to it), overwrite a downloaded ISO, CHKDSK
repair, and closing the app during a running operation (which killed the running tool mid-write). All of them
now default to Cancel/No.
• **Fixed a reentrancy hole in Shred and Surface test.** Both checked a "something is already starting" guard but
never set it, so the guard did nothing. During the file picker and confirmation dialogs — 49 lines of the shred
flow — a second destructive operation could be started on the same disk. Both now hold the guard for the whole
flow.
• **The "you are recovering onto the same disk" warning was misleading in 15 languages.** This is an OK/Cancel
dialog where OK writes onto the very disk being recovered. English and Romanian spelled out what each button
does; the other 15 languages had been translated as a flat refusal, with no indication that OK proceeds anyway.
All 15 rewritten to state the risk, the recommended alternative, that you may continue i

# Changelog

All notable changes to DriveForge are documented here. Dates are ISO (YYYY-MM-DD).

## v4.3.0 — 2026-07-26

A large safety and reliability pass across every feature in the app, plus a new keep-awake
behaviour and the removal of the wipe "certificate" feature.

### Removed
**The Wipe "Certificate of Data Erasure" has been removed.** DriveForge is not an accredited
certification body, and generating a certificate implied a level of formal assurance the
project isn't in a position to offer. Wipe itself is unchanged — it still securely overwrites
the drive — it just no longer offers to produce a certificate afterwards.

### New
**The PC no longer goes to sleep or hibernates while an operation is running** (wipe, clone,
backup, scan, download, etc.) — the display can still turn off. This cannot override a sleep
you initiate yourself (lid close, power button, Start > Sleep), and on a laptop running on
battery with Modern Standby, Windows still forces sleep about 5 minutes after its own timeout;
plug in for long jobs.
Progress reporting is more accurate: several operations (Wipe, raw ISO write + verify,
capacity test, Shred) could finish with the bar and percentage stuck around 89% and a
stats line quoting a bogus total instead of showing 100% / the real size.

### Safety fixes (data-loss / false-success prevention)
**File Analyzer**: duplicate/large-file deletion now goes through Windows' own delete
confirmation (with the "this can't be undone" warning) instead of silently bypassing the
Recycle Bin for files too large for it or on drives without one; a protected/master folder
set *after* a scan is now honored; Undo now actually restores files (it previously failed to
match filenames with extensions hidden); a file that was both a "largest file" and a
duplicate-set's last copy can no longer be deleted from both grids at once.
**Multi-Boot USB (Ventoy)**: re-verifies the target disk right before the wipe (a disk can
renumber if a drive is unplugged/replugged during the multi-minute download), verifies the
downloaded Ventoy tool is digitally signed before running it elevated, and no longer reports
success or failure incorrectly around timing edge cases.
**Disk erase tools**: Shredding a folder that contains a junction/symlink no longer follows it
onto another drive; "SSD Secure Erase" no longer claims blocks were discarded on media that
doesn't actually support TRIM (HDDs, most USB flash drives, some USB-bridged SSDs); FAT32
formatting over 32 GB (which silently fails) is now blocked up front instead of reporting
success on an unusable drive; Shred now also overwrites alternate data streams, not just the
main file content.
**Partition tools**: an interrupted overlapping partition move could previously corrupt data
with no way back — there's now an explicit warning plus an automatic backup of the partition
table before the move; Resize no longer reports success when the resize was actually declined.
**Diagnostics (Health / SMART / Surface scan / Speed test)**: a failing drive could be reported
as healthy in several cases (a stale cached report, a matching-substring bug that read
"Unhealthy" as containing "healthy", a surface scan that stopped on the first bad read and
called the rest of the drive fine); the Speed test — which writes to free space — now discloses
that and asks first, since those are exactly the clusters a Recovery scan might need.
**Clone, Restore, Export VHDX, Backup-to-image**: all four now correctly flag a run as
incomplete instead of reporting full success when files are skipped or a step fails partway
(previously only some of these were checked); restoring a backup now validates the saved image
and checks capacity honestly before wiping the destination; backing up now writes to a
temporary file and swaps it in only after the new backup is verified, so a failed backup can
no longer destroy a good existing one.
**Create Windows USB**: fixed BitLocker failures being silently swallowed and reported as
succe