We can use those commands in diskpart to wipe a hard drive clean before you reinstall the system or giveaway the hard drive
press
Win+R and type diskpart
and press
Enter and then in the command window type ?
(question mark) to see the explanation of each command, in which the ‘clean’ command defines as:
CLEAN - Clear the configuration information, or all information, off the disk.
As it indicates, it clear the config info off the disk, not the actual data (personal stuff, i.e.), so data on disks wiped from this command can be recovered
But the clean all
command is not listed in the help intro, that’s probably why some guides not sharing this command. Anyway, let’s get started
The “clean all” command, however, will remove everything (config info and data) from the disk, so nothing can be recovered after this command, but this step will take longer, and even longer especially when the hard drive capacity is large
In the diskpart window, type the commands below:
list disk
select disk x*
clean
like this screenshot:
The ‘CLEAN’ command takes 1-pass 0-overwrite on config intro sectors, the speed is fast
*: “x” is the disk you’re about to wipe, Then it will show the result
Both operations will trigger the initialize window if you run Disk Management and keep the cleaned disk plugged in. (Just ask you to create a GPT or MBR disk)
If the hard drive you’re about to wipe has Windows installed, you have to use this command from BIOS. Insert the Windows bootable media, click the recovery disc and click the “Command Prompt” to run diskpart and clean
Besides the clean
and clean all
commands to clean the entire disk in diskpart, we can use another built-in command tool called Cipher.exe to wipe free space if you have already performed the
Delete operation on the disk
Steps to wipe free space using Cipher
cmd
cipher /w:c:
To wipe free space on C Drive, replace it with another drive letter on the disk to wipe them individually
You may have found the shortages or doing this:
OK, that’s all for it, the commands methods to wipe hard drive end here, but if you’d like a tool with a graphical interface, you can try Data Wiper
Macrorit Data Wiper enables us to:
What’s more important, you can even wipe Windows even when it’s running, so to wipe hard drive in Data Wiper (no matter it has Windows or not), we click on the Wipe Entire Disk option and choose 1 wiping plan (from the listed 6) and click on the disk to wipe