Erase data is a step to prepare a clean hard drive before selling, you may have deleted person sensitive or private data after you decided to sell the old computer, but that's not enough, deleted files can be recovered by and data recovery programs without any efforts.
If there's nothing important on the disk, erase the hard drive is the securely way to protect personal info and habits.
Unlike MacOS, Windows has no default way of erasing free space even after Windows 10 releases.
To erase data on a hard drive we're about to sell, we need to hire some third-party data erasing software, Data Wiper is the one we're going to use and it's easy to use and make data clean again, here's how it works:
Have questions about wipe free space? check this page and learn more.
Wiping free space is one method to make disk clean again after manually deleted files, it's fast and a recommended way to erase data before selling for most of the users who want to keep the operating system, but for those who want to erase everything include Windows, wipe free space is not enough.
Wipe entire hard drive is the function used when you want to wipe the operating system drive along with other partitions, in Data Wiper, you can do the followings to wipe system partition:
Method 1: If you want to wipe Windows when it's running, do the followings:
Perform this operation After you have wiped other partitions is more convenient that Before doing this.
Method two: If the computer fails to boot, try this instead:
You can do the after wiped free space on other deleted partitions, or before wiping them, it doesn't matter, since after wiped system partition, you're still there in the WinPE system, you can do other wiping operations.
Instead of wiping the entire drive, we can actually wipe the entire disk when files on other partitions haven't been deleted but need to wiped as well. The Wipe entire disk is the same option with Wipe entire drive, the difference is click on the Disk instead of the Drive before wipe.
Note: Wipe entire disk will take longer time than wiping free space and you really need to wipe the disk once (one pass overwriting) to make the disk clean again.