Once you have done this, you should restart your computer and try again. This process is incredibly simple and will wipe your data securely in a matter of minutes.īefore you attempt to wipe your hard drive, make sure you have backed up all of your important files. You can also use your computer’s disk-burning software to create a bootable USB drive to wipe your hard drive. The PC Disk Eraser and the Ultimate Boot CD are free utilities that you can use. You can download free utilities that help you wipe your disk. To wipe your hard drive in Windows Vista, you must use a data-erasing tool. To do this, you should right-click your drive, select “format,” and then select the appropriate file system option. This removes all the data, leaving nothing but a blank surface. There are several ways to wipe your hard drive, and one of the easiest is to format it. Its faster to just erase/invalidate the partition, create a new partition, and MAYBE verify sectors instead of doing a real format and then verifying.If you are wondering how to completely remove all data from your computer, you should learn how to wipe your hard drive in Windows Vista. I prefer the 35 pass called Gutmann method. The only way to truly erase a disk is to have it do a 0 write pass. I would hope that this utility, DiskPart, issuing its 'clean' command actually does more than clear the data partition info.

It's possible to recover the data with a little work, primarily on the 'folders.' Format just basically wipes the file data/directory/folder content, not the data elsewhere on the drive. While I cannot guarantee this article does exactly what it claims it does (I haven't tried it, let alone heard about this way before) I can speak for the way format works now days.ĭrives come pretty much preformatted now days as to its sectors and such. 21240634 said:Am I missing something? Couldn't you just bring up a command prompt and type 'format e:' - or some other drive letter?

How to format my hard drive vista