DriveForge v4.5.0

v4.5.0 — 2026-10-13

A screen-by-screen audit of the whole app, driven on real hardware rather than read. Thirty-eight changes,
and almost all of them are the same fault wearing different clothes: the app knew something and did not
say it. A value was stored where it should have been worked out, a copy drifted from the thing it copied,
a promise was made with nobody responsible for keeping it, or a run wrote something down and then reported
a number that contradicted it.

Nothing here changes a file format or a saved setting. Updating is safe from any 4.x.

Fixed — a run now reports what it actually did

• A clone could take back three of the four options it offered you, into the log alone. The confirmation
  lists what the clone will do. If the data partition did not fit under an 8 GB floor it was silently
  dropped; if the layout had only two spare primaries the extra data partitions were capped and the final
  dialog counted only the ones it had attempted; and "Verify cloned data after writing" was skipped
  whenever the Microsoft engine ran — which the app can choose for you when you answer Yes to a prompt
  about speed. Each of the three is now named in the completion dialog, in all seventeen languages.
• Writing an image to several USB drives reported "6 of 6 drives written" when it had refused two of
  them. The refusal had a name and a reason in the code, both report layouts drew them, and nothing ever
  produced one. The same report also dropped drives that disappeared while the confirmation was on screen,
  and ticks with no drive connected. All three now appear, with the reason under each drive.
• "Windows is keeping this disk offline" reached one report out of two. The list shown after several
  drives said it; the single-drive dialog — the ordinary case — said "Done, plug it into the target PC"
  with an information icon, over a drive you will not find in Explorer.
• A read-only file-system scan could call a drive healthy. So could Create partition and Delete volume,
  which decided their verdict from a variable set to true and never lowered. Four flows announced a disk
  state without reading the disk back afterwards.
• The speed test spent 80 MB and spoke for the whole drive, and the disk-space analyser counted the
  Recycle Bin as free space. The capacity test now claims only what it actually wrote, which matters: it is
  the test that tells you whether a cheap flash drive is genuine.
• "Verify cloned data after writing" did not re-read every file, and now says what it does check.
• Clean traces: a stopped run was reported as a finished one, and a plain delete as a secure wipe. The
  wipe also named disk-sanitising standards it does not implement; it now asks which method you want before
  it promises anything about the result.
• Recovery now says when it was stopped, instead of only how many files came back — including inside
  recovered archives.

Fixed — screens that hid the thing they exist for

• Recover: the one volume the screen exists for was the one it would not list. Its retry hint was also
  gated on a counter that was treating failures as successes.
• Cleanup gave four different answers to "what is on screen", depending on which part you asked.
• Three finished tools had no button anywhere, and the Scan page's resting advice described behaviour
  that had already changed.
• The file-system menu stopped repeating the 32 GB FAT32 limit. Measured: FAT32 over 32 GB works, and no
  diskpart refusal exits with code 0 — the app was reading an exit code that cannot carry that meaning. It
  now asks rather than refusing.

Fixed — Stop

• Stop is answered as a Stop on every path behind the Start button. Several paths treated it as a
  failure, reported it as one, and one of them saved a log file to your Desktop on the way out.

Fixed — Download an ISO

• "Get latest" for Ubuntu was two LTS releases behind, and could not have caught up. The entry had 24.04
  written into it three times over — the label, the folder it looked in, and the filename it matched — under
  a comment promising the catalogue had no versions written into it. It now reads Ubuntu's release server,
  keeps the LTS releases and takes the newest. Reported by Keith Weisshar; thank you.
• Even inside 24.04 it served an older build than the one in the folder it was reading. The filename
  pattern could only express three number groups, so 24.04.5.1 was invisible to it and it handed out 24.04.4.
  A test now fails the build if any catalogue entry picks up a ceiling like that again.

Added

• The SHA-256 check is offered where an ISO arrives. The app always had the check, reachable only from
  two other screens — and the download screen's own warning used to tell you outright that there was none.
  When a download finishes you are now offered the check and the folder.

Changed

• The step numbers are gone from the interface. Half the app had already stopped following them.
• Sentences that point at a button now name the button, in every language.
• 46 of the 84 English error sentences a person could actually see are translated, four dialogs that were
  English end to end — including the one shown before erasing a drive — and the surface test's verdict now
  speaks the window's language.

Internal

• 16 string keys nothing displayed and 272 translations with them, and 18 members nothing called, are gone —
  with rules that stop them coming back, plus a guard on the join between a string key and the code that
  fills it.
• The test suite is now 170 invariants, each one written against a defect that was present and mutation-
  tested to confirm it fails when that defect returns.

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Full changelog