Is there an secure way to erase the laptop hard drive without a disc, I mean the media connecting with USB and CD-ROM, the USB ports are broken, and there’s no CD-ROM on the laptop either, I’m using an old HP laptop, I hope I can completely remove everything from the disk.
Note: The following mentioned methods will completely wipe everything from the disk, make sure to backup important stuff before performing the steps
You may have found solutions to wipe laptop hard drives clean with a bootable media, software like DBAN, Eraser or many other data erasing programs in this market, but there are indeed situations on laptops with broken USB ports and CD-ROMs, and of course, there are programs to solve this problem, we can erase the laptop hard drive or SSD without the assistance of bootable discs
The method we’re going to use can be applied for the following situations:
The Data Wiping program we’re about to use is Data Wiper, a portable program with both 32-bit and 64-bit packages, go ahead and download it, we’ll start to erase the disk and make it clean for selling
OK, now let’s run the program and check the disk map in the main interface, we run Disk Management, the built-in disk manager to do the same job, check to see how many disks (HDD or SSD) are connected to the computer, start with Disk 0, if you have more than one disk, the disk number adds on, so the above listed situations can be displayed like this:
OK, now we can run Data Wiper and take a good at the interface, it’s intuitive and let’s take a quick view, or check the Data Wiper tutorial for more info. Feel free to skip this section if you’re familiar with the UI.
There are mainly 3 sections in the main interface, they’re the three guide steps
3 Kinds of wiping targets:
6 Kinds of wiping method:
For detailed intro, please check the guides on different wiping schemes
This is the situation one of our customer described at the beginning of the page, media ports are broken, can’t use disc and USB, there’s one disk connected to the laptop, want to erase everything including the OS. Like the screenshot below:
The old version of Data Wiper shows Disk 1, new ones show Disk 0 instead
In Data Wiper, we can do this:
WIPE
in the input field to startSteps are the same for all the three situations, only the target hard drive varies, situation 1 is for most the laptops, one Disk 0 is installed, and it’s the only target we’re dealing with, some laptops have an SSD disk for the OS, an HDD hard drive for the data disk, that will make two disks listed in the Disk Management tool, Disk 0 and Disk 1, Data Wiper shows the same disk number like the Disk Management does, don’t click on the wrong disk when performing, and when the disk has no operating system, you won’t see this warning message blew but another one
When wiping both/all disks, please wipe the data disks firstly, wipe the system disk secondly, in this case, wipe Disk 1 before wiping Disk 0, if we wipe Disk 0 first, the laptop won’t reboot, let alone wiping the rest of disks, making sense, right?
Tip: Data Wiper can be used on any laptop brand, HP, DELL, TOSHIBA, GATEWAY, ACER or other computers brand
related questions of using Data Wiper:
Alternatively, you can Wipe hard drive and keep programs, keep the OS and wipe the rest of partitions no matter they’re on the same disk as Disk 0, or on the other disk like Disk 1, use the Wipe Partition in Data Wiper, the same option of Entire drive or disk, but this time we can click a partition instead of the entire disk.
Another alternative method we can make a drive clean is to wipe free space on it if you had already cut the original data to other volumes or delete everything on it. In Data Wiper, you can click the Free space only option and choose a partition to continue. Many methods are available, it’s up to you to choose the option that best suits your needs.