Need to wipe the drives in a few PC's and laptops

CompuDrew

CompuDrew

[H]F Junkie
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Dec 31, 2001
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My friend is retiring and closing his business. He has about 4 PC's and a few laptops that he'd like to give his employees, but is insisting the hard drives be wiped and 1's and 0's written on them prior to them getting Windows reinstalled for the employees.

What is the easiest option to do this? What's the best option to do this?

Thanks for your help!
 
the free version pf partition manager can do a random secure erase.
https://www.easeus.com/partition-manager-software/securely-erase-ssd-hdd.html
"The "Wipe Data" feature works almost identical to the Secure Erase commands. The only difference is that the free tool erases your data permanently by writing random numbers, not binary one or zero. No matter what the process is, the outcome is the same: your SSD or HDD will be securely wiped out."
 
If you can connect the drives to a different system as secondary disks (either directly or via USB) you can just use diskpart to do it.

1627337736731.png


clean all is the command. Just clean is super fast but doesn't write zeros to the whole drive, while clean all writes zeros to the entire drive.
 
Deadjasper said:
Is doing a low level format writing all zeros to the drive?
Click to expand...

There hasn't been 'low level format' for a very long time, like 30+ years.

Writing all zeros on a modern hard drive is enough to clear data without any chance of recovery (except the remapped bad sectors that can no longer be written no or read from w/o special hardware).
 
I have a program called HD Low Level Format. Whatever it does it takes a long time and zeroes out Pending Sector Count as a bonus. :p
 
sinisterDei said:
If you can connect the drives to a different system as secondary disks (either directly or via USB) you can just use diskpart to do it.

View attachment 378656

clean all is the command. Just clean is super fast but doesn't write zeros to the whole drive, while clean all writes zeros to the entire drive.
Click to expand...
Does clean all eventually say anything other then your screen shot? Like task complete or something LOL Surprised there isn't a % complete ticking away so you know it's actually doing something.
 
scgt1 said:
Does clean all eventually say anything other then your screen shot? Like task complete or something LOL Surprised there isn't a % complete ticking away so you know it's actually doing something.
Click to expand...
When it's done it'll return to the diskpart prompt, yes.
 
Unless they are SSD, just pop em out and hammer them, or drill a hole through them and toss away.
Telling the boss the drives are destroyed is a win, telling the employees to spend $40 on an SSD is a win, faster installs and updates while YOU prep them is a win
 
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