How to Wipe a Hard Drive Windows 10?

How do I wipe my hard drive clean Windows 10?

✍ Scenario 1: "I am in charge of clearing hard drives on returning machines. I have 35 1TB HDDs to wipe and a handful of other HDDs (Larger and smaller) to take care of as well. We plan on reusing them for as archives of data. So, what is the FASTEST way to wipe an HDD? Thanks for your support!"

✍ Scenario 2: "I want to sell my computer. Is it best to sell with or without hard drives? If sold with the drives, I don't want the new buyer could restore my data, so is there any way of ensuring the data is wiped and non-recoverable? Thanks in advance."

How to wipe a hard drive Windows 10?

From the scenarios, we can see there are many circumstances where you need to wipe a hard drive. However, it's not wise or safe if you just delete the partition with data on it manually. This is because neither deleting partition or formatting partition will erase all the data permanently, they just make the data hard to be found in the system. So, the deleted data can be easily recovered by some professional recovery utilities. Then here comes the question: how to wipe a hard drive in Windows 11/10/8/7? Scroll down and try any one of the following two practical methods.

Caution:✎...

No matter which method you would like to try, the wiping process will erase all the data completely and make them irrecoverable, so please back up your important files before wiping.

After cleaning up, all the space on the disk will show as unallocated, if you want to reuse it, you need to create partitions on it.

► Way 1. Use Command Prompt to wipe hard drive completely

When it comes to making operations on a hard drive, you may think of Windows built-in features like DiskPart and Disk Management. Luckily, DiskPart has this function to solve the "how to wipe a hard drive" problem. The step-by-step command is below:

Step 1. Press "Windows + R" at the same time, input "cmd" in the Run box and press "Enter" to open Command Prompt.

Step 2. In the Command Prompt window, type "diskpart" to enter the DiskPart window.

Step 3. Then type and run the following commands:

list disk: This will list all disks on your computer.

select disk x: "x" means the disk you want to wipe completely. Here we select disk 2.

clean all: This command line will delete all data from the selected disk.

► Way 2. Use a professional disk wiper to wipe hard drive safely and easily

Although Command Prompt could help you wipe hard drive, it shows some restrictions. For example, many users are worried about they will select the wrong disk because the DiskPart window doesn't show the specific information of their hard drives. Also, it won't allow you to wipe a system hard drive when it is running.  And the command line is difficult to operate, especially for thoses computer novices. To get around these limits and make out how to wipe a hard drive Windows 10 successfully, AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional should be your best choice.

Here is the Demo version allowing you to have a try to see how to wipe hard drive Windows 10, just download it and follow the several steps.

Step 1. Install and launch AOMEI Partition Assistant, and right-click on the hard drive you want to wipe, and choose "Wipe hard drive".

Step 2. Here you can choose a wiping method from the 4 options, and click "OK".

★Notes:

Fill sector with Zero: It will overwrite a hard drive with zero. It is safe and fast and prevents most recovery programs and software to retrieve any data.

Fill sectors with random data: It writes random data to the hard drive to make it harder to get some useful data from it. It is safer than the first option but takes a little more time.

DoD 5220.22-M: It is a software-based data sanitization method, which overwrites a drive with 3 passes: zeros, ones, and random data. It is very safe but takes more time to finish.

Gutmann: It performs 35 passes to wipe a hard drive. It is the safest way to prevent nearly all recovery tools from restoring any data but it takes the most time.

Step 3. You can preview the operation on the main interface, and click "Apply" to execute the task.

After a while, the hard drive will be completely wiped out, you can reuse it or sell it to others and don't need to worry about information leakage.

▌ You need to know: How to completely wipe an SSD?

It is worth mentioning that you couldn't apply "Wipe hard drive" to wipe an SSD because HDD and SSD have different working principles. If you employ the same way to erase the data on an SSD, the lifespan of the SSD will be decreased.

But don't worry, AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional is such a versatile tool that it's featured with a specific function named "SSD Secure Erase" for wiping SSD without hurting them.

Conclusion

This is all about how to wipe a hard drive Windows 10, and it's also applicable to other Windows editions. From the passage, we can see that you can always rely on AOMEI Partition Assistant if you have any problems about your disk. It will provide lots of other useful features to help you manage your partitions better. For instance, you can extend C drive, convert FAT32 to NTFS, check bad sectors, resize/move partitions, and so on.