A clean hard drive is required before we reinstall new operating system or sell the old computers, there’re many ways to wipe a hard drive properly, using built-in tools like diskpart command prompt, bootable USB, or third-party data wiping software. In this guide, we’ll introduce how to wipe entire drive, the free space, and the DoD wiping methods
Some users would like to wipe only personal stuff like downloaded files and installed programs or apps but keep OS, in Windows 10, things are easier than previous editions. In the new version 1803 Windows 10, you can do as follow to reset everything but keep Windows
Then Windows 10 will start to reset this PC, if you’d like to find more info and guide on this method, you can check Tim’s tutorial on how to reset Windows 10 from lifewire
We can also wipe a hard drive in Windows diskpart command line tool, but this method is to wipe the data drive instead of the system drive, you cannot wipe the system drive when Windows is running unless you try our Data Wiper, we’ll talk about later, now you can use the following commands to wipe any disk beside Disk 0 (system drive is always installed to Disk 0)
diskpart => list disk => select disk 1 => clean
In Windows 10, you can type cmd
in the search bar, if yo disabled cortana, you can press the Start button and then type ‘cmd’, right-click ‘Command Prompt’ and ‘Run as administrator’, type diskpart
to use this tool
If in the disk list, there’s only one disk (Disk 0), then diskpart can’t wipe this drive, you can use this PC1 as the operation machine, as take our the target hard drive from PC2 and plug-in PC1, then type ‘list disk’ again to display new added disk
Most organizations and companies would require the D.o.D wiping methods for old hard drives donating and selling, but none of the default tool in Window 10 has such functions or algorithms. We then need to turn to third-party hard drive wiping software, Data Wiper, e.g. is the only wiping program that can wipe system drive when the operating is running, that’s to say, you don’t need a bootable USB or CD to wipe the hard drive clean, just run the software and do the followings:
WIPE
to startMaybe you had already deleted personal apps, files and programs, it’s empty space on the disk, then we don’t have to wipe the entire drive any more, we just need to wipe the free space is enough to make sure the disk is clean. Unfortunately, diskpart and Disk Management still can’t wipe free space yet, and you may have noticed from the above screenshot that Data Wiper has a function call ‘Free space only’, is that ‘Wipe free space’ function? Yes, try those steps instead to wipe free space
Download Data Wiper portable edition
Yes, a thorough erasure would get rid of every virus
In Windows 10, the default Reset method, Fully clean the drive would remove everything including the virus and reinstall Windows 10
In Data Wiper, wipe entire disk or wipe entire drive functions are also capable of removing virus