How to Completely Wipe a Hard Drive on Windows
If you plan to sell or donate your hard drive, you should wipe it completely to remove personal data. This may also be necessary if you want to use a second-hand drive or remove malware. I will share two easy methods to help you permanently erase a drive in Windows.
Easy Way to Erase a Hard Drive in Windows
Before trying third-party tools, you can use the format command in Windows to permanently delete hard drive data. This method is helpful when you want to erase a second storage drive (on which Windows is not installed) or an external hard drive.
It will not help you completely erase the system drive (C drive) as it contains core files. DBAN and other third-party tools can help you with this, which I will explain after this method.
In the above command, replace volume with the drive letter and pass the number of times you want to overwrite each sector of the drive with Windows.
It\’s that simple. The process may take longer (even several hours) to complete depending on the size of the drive.
How to Completely Wipe a Hard Drive with DBAN
What if you want to destroy the data on your C: drive? Windows\’ built-in formatting tool can\’t help you with this. Although there are many third-party tools available, I recommend Darik\’s Boot and Nuke (DBAN).
DBAN is great for erasing all data at once. The tool runs in your computer\’s memory, just like a recovery drive or Linux live disk, and removes all data traces.
The free version of DBAN is fully capable of erasing your HDD. Therefore, you can ignore the premium version on its site and follow the instructions below.
- Identify your hard drive
To avoid accidentally erasing it, start by making sure you can identify your HDD. The easy way to do this is to open File Explorer and check the C: drive. As long as the device is labeled something like Local Disk (C:) or Windows (C:), you’re in the right place.
However, problems can arise when the C: drive is one of several, and they’re all partitions on the same physical drive. This can lead to inadvertently overwriting data on all partitions, not just the C: drive.
Right-click on the drive letter and select Properties > Hardware to find the hardware name of the device. Note its name as you’ll need it when using DBAN.
- Download DBAN and create a bootable USB drive
DBAN is available for download as an ISO file. Therefore, you’ll need to create a bootable USB drive from the ISO with a tool like Rufus.
- Boot into DBAN
The free version of DBAN only works with legacy BIOS and doesn’t work properly with Secure Boot. So, you have to enable legacy support in BIOS settings and disable Secure Boot.
After that, restart your PC and press the specified F-key or Esc key to open the boot device selection menu. Select the DBAN USB drive and press Enter.
- Wipe your hard drive with DBAN
You will find some keyboard shortcuts at the bottom of the screen that let you make changes to the wipe process.
R changes the number of passes for each disk sector. It multiplies the default passes for each available wipe method. For example, the default DoD short has three passes by default, so using R you can change it to nine passes by specifying a value of 3.