How To Completely Erase And Wipe A Hard Disk Drive ?

Note: Tutorial is also for corrupted hard disk repair solution.

Did you know deleting file isn’t enough to completely erase or shred a file from your hard disk (HDD)? When your operating system delete’s a file or folder, it is only remove and hide that file reference and header to make it unreadable and create a free space in your hard disk to store something else. That means your file is still live in your hard disk after deleting and you can recover it until you’ve overwrites something on the recent blank space of that file.

Why use disk wipe?

Yes! Deleted file can be recoverable if you don’t wipe your hard disk completely and that’s bad if you’re selling or given your computer or laptop to someone else, which you don’t want that person will access your private data in future. Other that selling sometimes deleting and overwriting data in Hard disk for long time may also cause of slow data transformation or corruption of your drive and then it needs to get wipe because of collected collection of data bad sector.

What does disk wipe do?

Disk wipe is a loop process of overwriting data on your hard disk which cause permanently removal of data.

How to use disk wipe?

Normally there are lots of software available on the internet which can provide disk wipe utility free or paid in order to fulfill customer’s needs but in this tutorial I’m going to show you a free and effective software called dban (Darik’s Boot And Nuke) which can erase and remove all your data and collect bad sector from your Hard disk and make it clean as new.

Note: Take a backup of all your data if needed or otherwise it will gone forever. 

Step 1 – Download dban latest version from official website link given below.

http://www.dban.org/download

Step 2 – Make a bootable disk of recently downloaded dban’s iso file

Step 3 – Boot dban cd (start your computer with dban’s cd) by quick boot menu or manually configured “Dvd-Drive” as first boot device.

Step 4 – Now you’ll able to see “Dban’s Main Screen” on your computer. Just press enter to continue.

After when some process done you’ll able to see your Harddisk listed in the disk & partition column. If your hard disk isn’t listed there that means you having a problem with your Hard disk or maybe this software wont supports your Hdd .

Step 5 – Press “M” key to show wipe methods.  You can also use my recommend method listed below according to your use.

Quick Erase – Select quick erase if you want to format and wipe your data quickly and this method will only perform a single wipe pass and I won’t recommend this because a single pass wont effects very much for you hard disk to be erased completely.

DoD Short – Mostly this method is most famous and also works great if you just want to erase data.

DoD 5220.22-M – This method is more effective that above one and also more time consuming so, only select this method if you needed because it will take hours to complete.

Step 6 – Now press “Space” to select your drive and after that press “F10” to start disk wiping.

After the wiping fully completes, remove the dban’s bootable cd and restart your computer and now all your data is gone.

 PHYSICAL DAMAGE

If you think your data is too important and you don’t want to make it leaked then it’s better to keep your drive with yourself or you can physical damage the Hdd if the data is also won’t safe with you. You can use a hammer or a drill machine to break your drive.

Enjoy.............NCTTS