How to completely wipe drives?

[Kuldar_Joel]

I want to wipe a drive with windows and everything. Will doing it through diskpart work? diskpart, list disk, sel disk #, clean disk

[Digideath]

Yep that's how you do it. Have done it many times before. And i know why youre asking. Because of those bloody windows partitions you can't delete or erase during a format or through disk manager.

[Eigenvektor]

Are you trying to wipe it before selling it, or something else? Diskpart should do the job.

 

Otherwise, if you simply want to reinstall the OS, just reinstall it, no need to wipe it beforehand.

[Radium_Angel]

DBAN. Accept no substitutes

[BobVonBob]

2 minutes ago, Radium_Angel said:

DBAN. Accept no substitutes

On a hard drive sure, but DBAN shouldn't be used on SSDs.

 

If the drive is an SSD you can download the manufacturer's software, there's usually an option called something like "secure erase" that will wipe everything on the drive.

[Bad5ector]

8 minutes ago, Radium_Angel said:

DBAN. Accept no substitutes

I mean yeah, if you're planning on decommissioning the drive or reselling it and it was an HDD. But to just clean the disk to start a new install of Windows or start with a completely fresh drive with all space available, then the diskpart method is my go to. 

[Ripred]

microwave bangwiped

[Eigenvektor]

1 minute ago, Bad5ector said:

But to just clean the disk to start a new install of Windows … then the diskpart method is my go to.

Shouldn't be needed. Just start the installer, erase all partitions when it asks you where to install Windows then select the empty drive.

[Bad5ector]

4 minutes ago, Eigenvektor said:

Shouldn't be needed. Just start the installer, erase all partitions when it asks you where to install Windows then select the empty drive.

Yeah, I still do the diskpart method since using the Windows installer to "erase" the drives can sometimes take longer depending on how many partitions I have to click on and then click erase and then wait for screen to refresh. I find for me it's faster to just hit shift+f10 during the Windows install to bring up CMD prompt and run Diskpart to clean the disk while it's at the disk select screen.

 

To quote ALF: "More than one way to skin a cat"

[Bad5ector]

There is also another reason why I like to use Diskpart, it's because I come from the days of FDISK and if you wanted to do a format, the format was Fdisk, format, reinstall windows. (FFR is what it became known as in my circle... eventually it started to stand for Fucking Format and Reinstall, but I digress). You could just have booted to a cmd and run the command format c: /Q /V:volume_name and got the job done without Fdisk, but I ended up finding the hard way that formatting alone won't remove certain viruses. During the format, if the partition wasn't blown away with FDISK, the format would kick off, but the virus would mask itself as a badsector and have the format process block those badsectors off from being formatted. Once you booted back to Windows after a fresh install, the virus would reinfect the system. In my case this was the WinCIH virus (Chernobyl): 

 

CIH (computer virus) - Wikipedia

 

So, just a heads up for folks who think they have a virus and figure just doing a reinstall will be enough. I would highly recommend a diskpart /clean if you find yourself in that situation, before going on to reinstall Windows.

[Takumidesh]

since you didn't specify what you want to do with the disk afterword. I like to disassemble them and use them as disc golf markers, after stepping on the raw platter a few thousand times and letting it sit around in my bag, i'm pretty sure it gets thoroughly wiped.