You think that you delete something off your hard drive and its gone forever? You have never been so wrong. Actually, wiping a drive is completely something different than your casual Shift + Del. Deleting something doesn’t really delete it forever, but the Operating System just makes you think that way. Even formatting doesn’t ensure that your deleted data can’t be recovered.
Therefore, it is essential to know how to really wipe your hard drive clean. There are multiple reasons why you would want to hard drive. Either you are selling your machine, or throwing it away completely, you must ensure that whoever gets their hands, wouldn’t be able to restore the data using free tools like Recuva.
Note: It is worth mentioning that once you wipe your hard drive clean, it is nearly impossible to recover it. Therefore, proceed further at your own risk.
Because of this, you might want to backup any important data on your hard drive to an external storage medium or on the cloud. Once this is done, just follow the steps:
Wiping a Hard Drive clean
First of all, you need to download a free data destruction program, which you can from the link here.
You would need a software which would wipe clean your hard drive outside Windows if you totally want to wipe your hard drive clean including the Windows partition. (the first eight from the given look would do the job, though we would personally go for DBAN).
The next task is fairly simple: After downloading the relevant software follow through the relevant steps for installation or in case of a bootable software to erase Windows drive as well, you would need to create a Bootable USB or CD/DVD. You would then need to boot from the relevant USB Flash Drive or CD/DVD.
After this just follow the on-screen instructions, which presents you with several options to completely wipe your HDD. The most common method is a zero write which writes your drive with all zeroes. If you totally want to get rid of your HDD, you might want to use the 7-pass method.
Starting from Windows Vista to Windows 10, every drive you format with the “quick format” options as un-ticked would get zero-written, which is enough for commoners. Though for further security and peace of mind, you might want to wipe using specialized software.