DriveForge v4.3.0

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
  success, 32-bit/ARM64 images not booting on UEFI, and a double-click launching two destructive
  operations on the same disk at once.
• Download ISO / Verify ISO checksum: fixed picking the wrong (older) release when several
  point releases exist, a truncated download being saved as if complete with no warning, and
  common checksum-paste formats (a filename attached, a sha256: prefix, a whole checksum-list
  file) being flagged as "does not match" on a perfectly good image.

Other fixes and improvements

• Fixed the nav-sidebar "Clone to USB / external drive" label getting cut off mid-word in every
  language.
• Fast Clone is now the default cloning engine (was DISM); its warning text no longer mentions
  antivirus, and cloning now shows a single format-confirmation prompt instead of two.
• The Desktop clone report is now only created when something needs a second look — a clean
  successful clone no longer leaves a folder + text file behind.
• The progress bar now resets properly after pressing Stop on any operation (previously stuck at
  its last position on most of them).
• Selecting Wipe no longer makes the Drive-tools overview card spuriously repaint as if you'd
  clicked Health.
• TestBoot (boot a physical disk in a VM) now protects against targeting the wrong disk, no
  longer strands a disk offline silently on a script error, and recovers automatically if the
  app is closed or crashes mid-session.
• Numerous smaller correctness fixes in the raw NTFS clone/recovery engine shared by Clone,
  Export, Restore and Recover (bounds-checking on malformed filesystem records, alternate data
  streams on hidden/system files and directories, 4Kn sector alignment).

v4.2.0 — 2026-07-13

Adds faithful backup-image restore and completes the multi-language coverage.

Backup & restore

• Restore from a VHDX backup (made by Export VHDX) now writes the image back to a drive faithfully — using the same raw engine that makes Clone This PC an exact copy (preserving apps, permissions, hardlinks, reparse points and alternate data streams). Verified end to end: the restored drive boots on real hardware.
• The backup image is now attached through the native Windows Virtual Disk API instead of scripting an external mount — it is read-only, cleans up any leftover mount automatically, and can never leave the image file locked.
• Restore reliability fixes: correct handling when Windows auto-assigns a drive letter to the mounted image, the right Windows volume is chosen inside multi-partition images, and the target is only formatted after the image is confirmed readable.

Language

• Full 17-language coverage: every remaining stage/status message and completion dialog on the backup / clone / restore screens is now translated, so a chosen language shows no leftover English.

Under the hood

• Renamed the project internals throughout (no functional change).
• Numerous smaller reliability fixes across the imaging paths.

This release also carries the safety + reliability work listed under v4.1.2 below, which had not yet been published as a download.

v4.1.2 — 2026-07-04

A large safety + reliability release. DriveForge writes whole disks, so this focuses on
never doing the wrong thing, and on being clear about what is happening.

Safety (data-loss prevention)

• Destructive confirmation dialogs now default to the safe button (Cancel/No), so pressing Enter never erases a drive by accident.
• Every destructive write now re-verifies the target disk's identity (size + serial) immediately before writing — Windows can renumber disks when a drive is unplugged/replugged between the scan and the click. Covers wipe, format, secure-erase, raw ISO write, and the partition tools (Initialize, Convert, Move, Delete, Quick-partition).
• Refuses to write when the source file is stored on the target disk (raw ISO write and image restore) — this used to be able to destroy the very file being written.
• Restore now verifies the backup image's integrity before formatting the target — finding a corrupt backup after erasing the destination (a dead-PC recovery) was the worst possible ordering.
• Pressing Stop during secure file-shred no longer deletes the partially-overwritten file (that would lose it and leave its data recoverable).
• Scheduled/unattended clone now matches the target drive by serial number (not just name+size) and never targets the system disk.

Cloning a PC

• Detects your active real-time antivirus (any vendor, via Windows Security Center) and warns before cloning that it can drastically slow the process — with a clear choice to pause/exclude it. DriveForge never touches your antivirus itself.
• Skips antivirus data/quarantine folders and developer caches (NuGet/npm/pip/cargo) during capture — these are self-protected or huge and slow the imaging engine.
• Clearer live status: distinguishes "engine busy (high CPU)" from "drive stalled", and no longer looks frozen during the normal scan phase.
• Disables legacy 8.3 short-name generation on the target for a faster many-file apply.
• Antivirus temporarily disabled on the clone for first-boot app repair is now re-enabled automatically and reliably, and is left untouched on the Windows-To-Go path (which has no auto-restore).

Reliability & correctness

• Added a global crash handler that saves a crash log to %LocalAppData%\DriveForge\crash.log and shows a clear message instead of vanishing.
• Progress/speed/ETA parsing is now culture-invariant (was breaking on comma-decimal locales).
• Drive health no longer shows a Warning drive as healthy just because its status text also contains "OK".
• Recovery deep-scan bounds its memory like the other scanners; disk read-back verification no longer reports a genuine drive as FAKE on a short read.
• Partition-tool success is now reported correctly on non-English Windows (no longer keyed off the English word "successfully").
• Numerous smaller fixes: settings-file robustness, first-run language matching your OS, safe stop/pause flags, resource disposal.

Build & trust

• Self-contained single-file build is now compressed (smaller download).
• Releases now carry GitHub build-provenance attestation — verify with gh attestation verify DriveForge.exe --repo ForgeLabsSoft/driveforge.

v4.1.1 — 2026-06-28

• First open-source (GPL-3.0) release built from public source via GitHub Actions, with SHA-256 checksums.