How to Clean Wipe your hard drive before disposal

There is no need to buying very expensive tools to wipe your drive clean and securely so the data cannot be recovered. It is a good practice before you dispose your old hard drive that you completely clean it and wipe securely so the data is impossible or very difficult to recover.

Since Windows 7 there is a build utility in Windows that you can use to overwrite your hard disk and completely wipe so the data cannot be recovered.

When it comes to cleaning SSD/HDD successfully, you can use DiskPart command “clean” or “clean all“. Both commands can erase or wipe a disk leaving it unallocated and not initialized. But they have a slight difference.

▸“clean” command will delete all partitions on the SSD/HDD drive. But it only marks the data as deleted, not zero the disk. This data can be recovered using special data recovery software.

▸“clean all” command will erase the drive’s contents securely. It will write over every sector on the disk and zero out completely to delete data on the disk. And the deleted data cannot be recovered via usual tools.

The steps are very simple:

• Open CMD as an Administrator
• Type in diskpart
• Type in list disk
• You should see now listed disks on your machine
• In my case, I have 3 disks, 1 internal and 2 external, I want to wipe the external disk # 2
• Type in select disk 2
• Type list disk – to verify that I have selected correct disk, you should see * in front of the selected disk
• Now you are ready to wipe your disk, you have two options
• If you want ONLY wipe data ( data is still recoverable ) you type clean
• If you want totally wipe and securely delete data beyond recovery – use clean all
• Once you issue the command the drive will be wiped and the process takes some time, depends on your size of drive
• Once completed, you should see message: “DiskPart succeeded in cleaning the disk“
• You can type exit to close the window

All commands that you need to know. Once completed, you can now dispose of your SDD/HDD disk.