Erase locked hard drive

by Jane / Tue Dec 26 2017 / UPDATED in Wipe Hard Drive

Have you forgot the Bitlocker restore key when you want to disable this function in Windows? Superuser Amenti met this once:

I have a HD protected by Bitlocker. Login, password and restorekey are unknown and all I want to do is wipe the whole drive. When I try to boot from a windows installation cd I have no access to the drive since it asks for the restore key I don’t have. Superuser

Another user of this forum provided a solution - Use a Linux live CD from GParted and delete all partitions.

Other solutions like using diskpart command line, or format the drive, or use WinPE system to delete the partition are shared, you could try, and some users found that the command line method with the command clean didn’t work on Windows 10, if you’re using this operating system, you could try using Data Wiper, the third party data cleaning software instead, or if all the listed solutions can’t access or format the locked volume, try Data Wiper

Download Data Wiper, the installation or the portable package, install it or directly run the portable file from the 32-bit or 64-bit separated folder, and do the following to erase the locked drive:

  1. Click on the locked / encrypted drive in the main interface when Data Wiper loaded all the disks and partitions
  2. Click Wipe entire drive/disk in the first section
  3. Choose a wiping method in the second section
  4. Click Wipe Now and confirm (type the keyword wipe)

Data Wiper

The you can use Partition Expert or the default Disk Management to Create a new partition on the unallocated space wiped by Data Wiper.

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