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 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 if it is your only disk, and what each button does.

Fixed

• German text on that warning used informal address, out of step with every other German dialog, and called an SSD/USB drive a "hard disk". • Arabic：the button legend on that warning displayed mirrored relative to the actual button positions. • Turkish text said "the files you rescued" rather than "the files you are trying to rescue". • Pause buttons lost their state when the language was switched：while an operation was paused, the button that resumes it reverted to reading "Pause". The Clean panel's button likewise lost its computed size. • The engine checkboxes (Microsoft DISM / Fast Clone) no longer appear when installing Windows from an ISO — they only ever applied to cloning, and did nothing there. • Installing from an ISO no longer shows the "you may need to reinstall your antivirus" note. That note is about restoring a clone of an existing PC; a fresh install from a Windows ISO has no antivirus on it. • Removed two unused, half-translated internal strings.

New — reporting a problem

• Added a way to report problems, since until now nothing in the app pointed anywhere：Settings → Report a problem, plus an offer after a failed operation and a pointer in the crash dialog. It opens either the bug form on GitHub or an email to support@forgelabssoft.com, with your app and Windows versions already filled in. • Nothing is submitted until you send it yourself — there is still no telemetry and no automatic crash reporting. The GitHub link deliberately carries only the version and Windows build：error messages in this app quote full file paths, which on Windows contain your account name, and GitHub issues are public. The email option does include the error text for you to review first, with your profile path replaced by %UserProfile%. • The offer after a failure is deliberately quiet：it never appears when you pressed Stop, never during a background disk rescan, never in unattended scheduled runs, and at most once per operation.

Under the hood

• Added an automated test suite (79 tests, runs in about a second) covering the pure logic, all 17 localizations (key parity, placeholder counts, duplicate keys, structural drift) and the project's own code invariants. It runs on every push and blocks a release if it fails. Four of the fixes above were found by it on its first run. • Added a manual hardware-test checklist for the parts that cannot be automated.

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 8