Wiping a Hard drive is not quite kaboom task, here is the all steps you should do before in order to wipe a hard drive completely. Both SSD and HDD can be wiped out using the following methods.
Warning: This will erase all content stored on a hard drive. If you have something important, consider taking a backup. If the hard drive is primary storage of your computer, it will also blow the operating system, and worse your computer won’t boot.
For all the methods we’re using the official “Disk management” tool of windows to wipe/format/delete partitions on hard disk. Some advanced disk management programs are also available on the Internet, you can use them to wipe your hard disk can.
Method 1. Wiping using another computer.
- Plug the hard disk using the appropriate cable to the other computer. If the hard drive is plug-and-play supported, open the “Disk Management” tool.
- If the hard disk have multiple partitions, right-click on each partition and select the “Delete volume” option, unless you see all the partition merge into full unallocated space.
- Now right click on the unallocated space area and select “Create a volume” make sure to use all the space. once the partition is created, right click on it and select format.
Method 2. Leaving the Windows partition.
Do this even you want to wipe your primary hard drive and keep running the installed operating system on it.
- Open “Disk management” app and don’t touch the system partition, most of the time windows default partition is (C:).
- Look for other partitions and right click and select “delete volume“, do this until all the partition (except C) is deleted and turned into unallocated space.
- Now you can create a single partition and then format it using the Format tool. There will be two option 1. Quick format 2. Full format. The full format makes it hard to recover the deleted data from the hard drive.
Method 4. When you have lot’s of hard drive to format.
If you have so many hard drives to format use a tool like, Hard disk shredder. Though they are expensive, but worth if you have literally myriad of them.
Method 5. Wipe before destroying and sending to recycle.
What are required.
1. A hammer and a thin nail.
2. Gloves (You’re sure you won’t get your finger punchered).
3. Eye protection glass: You started with two of them and it’s not a good idea to take any chance.
Plug the hard drive to a computer and delete the partitions and format them. Now turn off the computer and remove the hard drive. Take out the hammer, wear the protection glasses and Start with the sledgehammer to thumb the nail. once you’re satisfied cool down, and handover hard disk(s) to recycle unit.
