
- Secure erase hard drive windows 10 how to#
- Secure erase hard drive windows 10 full#
- Secure erase hard drive windows 10 software#
- Secure erase hard drive windows 10 Pc#
Then scratch the surface of the internal circular disc (platter) with the screwdriver or -better- break it with a hammer so it can not be read even if it is loaded onto another hard drive.Ģ. To do that, take a screwdriver and disassemble the drive. If you do not want to use the drive in the future then you can permanently destroy its contents by just destroying the disk.
Secure erase hard drive windows 10 Pc#
The first two programs (CCleaner & Eraser) can be used to wipe a drive from within the Windows environment and the third program (DBAN) can be used to erase all the computer contents by starting your PC from the DBAN boot media. In this tutorial we present three (3) reliable data destruction programs in order to totally erase your computer or a certain drive (Hard disk, USB stick, Memory card, etc.) for FREE.

Secure erase hard drive windows 10 software#
The most secure method, to completely wipe a hard disk, is to use a data destruction software (also known as "drive wipe" or "disk sanitization" software), because this kind of software fully erases the hard drive by overwriting all the stored information multiple times in order to make impossible the data retrieval.

Secure erase hard drive windows 10 how to#
How to Permanently Erase a Computer Hard Drive, USB or Memory stick. So if the drive or the partition isn't overwritten, the data can be recovered by using a hard drive data recovery program. What about when formatting the drive or deleting the partition? In general the result is the same: the data remains on the disk, because when you format a hard drive or when you delete a partition the system erases only the indexing information of all the stored data and doesn't totally destroy them by overwriting the whole drive contents with zeros or with other random data. Now, when you delete a file on a drive, the system doesn't really erases the file (all the zeros and ones that concerning the file), but instead it removes only the reference to that file, which means that everyone can retrieve the deleted file by using a file recovery program, unless the data is overwritten. That means that any single file (text, document, photo, program, etc.) is nothing else than a row of 0's and 1's. By wiping a drive (hard disk, USB, Memory card, etc.), you ensure that all it's stored data will be erased permanently and no one can retrieve the data from it, in any way.Īs you may already know, any piece of information that stored on a drive, is stored in the form of 0 and 1.
Secure erase hard drive windows 10 full#
The /p parameter doesn’t work together with the /q (fast formatting) parameter.Īccording to the information on the Microsoft page, the /p parameter is redundant, since Starting from Vista and above, the format command always overwrites the disk with zeros when performing full formatting. Press Y and wait until formatting is complete (depending on the number of passes and disk size, this may take a long time).
