Wiping out every information on your hard drive is very easy. Deleting everything does not wipe a hard drive. It requires some extra steps to wipe the hard drive completely.
There are a lot of reasons why you might want to clean up your hard drive. It could be as simple as making previous data untraceable or enforcing a hard drive repair.
How to Delete a Computer Hard Drive
- You have to back up anything you want to keep, such as photos, software product keys, etc. And when you are done wiping out your information on the hard drive.
- Download a free data destruction program. After any of the first six programs we recommend on that list will work great because they can be used to wipe a hard drive from outside of Windows.
- Then, complete whatever steps are necessary to install the software or, in the case of a bootable program like DBAN, get the ISO image on a CD or DVD disc, or a USB device like a flash drive:
- You have to wipe out the hard drive according to the program’s instructions.
A Simple Hard Drive Wipe Alternative
Beginning in Windows Vista, the format process changed and a single write zero passes are applied to each standard (non-quick) format.
If a single write zero passes are good enough for you, consider your drive wiped after a regular format in Windows 10, 8, 7, or Vista. And if you want something even more secure, go ahead and follow the hard drive wipe instructions above.
Keep in mind, too, that this is a wipe of just the partition you’re formatting. And you need to have more than one partition on a physical hard drive. All you have to do is to format those additional drives. As well if you want to consider the entire physical disk as “wiped.”