How to Clean a Hard Drive in Windows 10? [2 Ways Included]

“How to clean my hard drive to sell it?”

“I have a Dell computer running Windows 10 Pro. The computer’s second hard drive contains sensitive material. Now I want to sell it and buy another larger one, so I need to completely and permanently erase all my files on the hard drive so that nobody can recover and see it. I have been researching different methods online but it is a minefield, can anyone help? How to clean a hard drive Windows 10?”

2 Methods to wipe clean a hard drive in Windows 10

Cleaning a hard drive is to erase all data stored on the hard drive; it is a great way to free up space on hard drive, or prevent personal data leakage after selling, donating or throwing away it. But how to wipe clean a hard drive in Windows 10/8/7? You can try the following two methods.

• 1. Clean a hard drive via Command Prompt
• 2. Clean hard drive via a GUI professional disk wiper

1. Clean a hard drive via Command Prompt

First of all, you can make use of Windows 11/10 built-in Command Prompt to clean a hard drive. Open Command Prompt: press Windows+R at the same time, input “cmd” in the Run box and press Enter. In the elevated Command Prompt window, type “diskpart” to enter diskpart window. Then run the following commands:

• list disk: list all disks on your computer.

• select disk 1,2,3…: select the disk you want to wipe completely. Here we select disk 2.

• clean all: delete all data from the selected disk.

Note: Besides running the clean command, you can also execute a special format command “format f: /fs:NTFS /p:1”. This command will format the f drive with the NTFS file system and write zeros to the drive for a single pass. It can prevent most hardware based and all software based recovery methods from lifting information from the drive.

2. Clean hard drive via a GUI professional disk wiper

Wiping hard drive clean via Diskpart seems like a great solution, but some users report this command line based utility is difficult to operate and easy to wipe the wrong disk, so most users scount for a GUI hard drive eraser tool like the below one.

“Looking for GUI software to write zero to HDD. I have a few hard drives around that I don't use and plan to put them up on eBay for reselling. I want to make sure them sold without any data left inside.”

In this situation, I highly recommend AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional. With an intuitive interface, every user can easily choose the right disk and perform a disk wiping operation. Besides, it provides 4 different methods to clean a hard drive in Windows 10/8/7: Fill sectors with Zero, Fill sectors with random data, DoD 5220.22-M and Gutmann.

Note: The data will be removed completely via this method and it’s impossible to recover them after that. So please be careful and back up important data to cloud or external at first.

Step 1. Install and launch AOMEI Partition Assistant Pro on your Windows 11/10 computer, right-click the disk you want to wipe and choose “Wipe Hard Drive”.

Step 2. In the subsequent window, you can choose a suitable wiping method from the 4 options according to your actual requirements. Then click “OK”.

Step 3. Back to the main interface, click “Apply” on the top left corner to actually starting erasing the selected hard drive.

On completion, all data have been successfully wiped out from the hard drive. If you want to erase an SSD drive without hurting it, AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional’s “SSD Secure Erase Wizard” can satisfy you best.

Final Words

This is all about how to clean a hard drive Windows 10 via Command Prompt and professional hard drive wiper software. Besides wiping a hard drive clean, AOMEI Partition Assistant Pro offers many other fantastic functions such as clone HDD to another SSD/HDD, recovering partition deleted accidentally or data, transfer OS from HDD to SSD, and more. If you are running Windows Server, you can try AOMEI Partition Assistant Server.