Wiping the Hard drive

Sometimes it’s a good idea to wipe the hard drive beyond recovery to prevent someone else from getting that information about the previous owner.     It is always a good idea to erase the information before you sell or recycle or even donate your computer.   You can destroy the data on the hard drive with little or no effort but it does takes an app to do it.   Depending on your situation, if you have an OEM system, than you will probably want to reinstall Windows into the system that you are going to wipe securely and erase the data on the hard drive.  It’s best before you do this to create a USB or DVD of the operating system you are going to wipe.   If this is Windows 10, you can download the the media creation tool for Windows 10 and make a bootable USB for Windows 10 for after the wiping of the hard drive.  If this is an older system like Windows 7, I would suggest before wiping checking to see if you have the DVD for it or you could buy a Windows 7 from amazon using my Affiliate Link, which I’ll get a small amount of money when you do that.  If this is another system all together, Like Linux, or even Mac OS you’ll have to get a copy of the operating system that you are going to wipe and reinstall it to be helpful to the next person to use the system.

DBAN : Darik’s Boot and Nuke

This is one of the utilities that I use to remove and erase all the information securely to prevent anyone from getting the information that is on the hard drive.    It’s open sourced and can be downloaded freely.   They do have an enterprise version that is for those who are running a business and requires a license to do use in a business environment.  This is however the first one that I use when I have a Hard drive that I need to erase, destroy,  or wipe the entire Hard drive.  This can even be used on SSD and NVME’s.

MHDD

This one is similar to DBAN but has some interesting features that work well with what I might need to do.  I often times will us MHDD after I use DBAN just to be safe and make sure nothing is left on the hard drive, or the Solid State drives to prevent anyone from getting any information from the hard drive.  This probably sounds like over kill but I figure it sometimes is needed to prevent the people from accessing the data.  It was developed by Dmitry Postrigan and I have used this program from time.  You’ll need to download the ISO and create a bootable USB or CD/DVD to use this program and I suggest something like Yumi Pen Drive creator to make a USB Bootable Disk for MHDD.

Formatting the HDD, SSD, or NVME

This is the last option I would suggest because this option is only going to do it once and you’ll need to format the disk several times with different commands to provide enough assurances that the data is destroy or wiped.  This option is good for those disk drives that didn’t have any really important information on them and had either games or files that probably didn’t have anything on that would be too personal  for anyone to find.   I usually use this as a last resort when I know the system wasn’t used to keep personal data and maybe the HDD was being exclusively used for games on it.  The format command on a HDD or SSD could be useful because it’s already on the media creation tool and can be accessed by hitting Shift+F10.

Then all you will need to do it type:

format <drive>: /fs:NTFS /p:1 (For zeros)
or
format <drive>: /fs:NTFS /p:2 (For one's)

This will write zero’s  or one’s to every sector on the HDD or SDD and will securely erase the data.   I have found to go from zero’s to one’s or doing one’s than doing zeros.   Be warned thought doing this will take a very long time.  It could be hours between passes.

This option is good when you have a system that you can use to install and format HDD and still do other things on the system or if you can pull the HDD and SSD out and temporarily install it on the working system.  While it does it things you can do other things on the system.   Be warned this might take some of your system resources while you are formatting the HDD in question.  The System might be a bit slower to respond.   Also it will take a VERY long time to do multiple passes on a HDD.  So don’t be surprised if it takes several minutes to go from 0 to 1% or several hours to even get to 100% depending on the size of the drive you are formatting.

Do you have any good tools that work better?  Why not leave a comment and tell me what you use to securely wipe hard drives and SSD’s.  Why not share your experiences and hear how you do it.  If this has helped you with something, why not consider checking out my affiliate links below and say thank you for this great resource.