Clearing a hard drive

donttouchmytots · February 21, 2022

Hello I was wondering if I got a SATA to USB cable would I be able to completely wipe the hard drive so I can put it back in a laptop to install Pop! OS

Electronics Wizardy · February 21, 2022

No need to wipe the hdd before putting in the laptop. You can wipe and do the install all from the pop os installer

Needfuldoer · February 21, 2022

The Pop OS installer will give you the opportunity to reformat the hard drive.

You can also hook it up to a Windows machine and wipe the drive with Diskpart. (Note: there is no undo! Make 100% sure you have the right drive selected before you clean the drive!)

https://www.seagate.com/support/kb/how-to-diskpart-eraseclean-a-drive-through-the-command-prompt-005929en/

Another option would be to zero the drive out with DBAN while it's in the laptop. (Boot DBAN off a flash drive.) But that's overkill for your use case because you're keeping the drive.