First Things First: Back Upīefore you break out the Louisville Slugger (or follow our simple steps below), make sure your data is backed up as part of a 3-2-1 backup strategy where you keep three copies of your data on two types of media with one off-site. But, there are much easier and more reliable, if less satisfying, ways to make sure your Windows PC is as clean as the day it left the factory. Truly, physical destruction is one way to go (more on that later). You always have the option of taking a baseball bat to the thing. Remember to enter the correct drive or partition when executing this command.Are you hanging on to an old PC because you don’t know how to scrub the hard drive clean of all your personal information? Worried there’s data lurking around in there even after you empty the recycle bin? (Yes, there is.) The above command will write zeros to all the blocks, a block size of 4096, in the specified device or partition, sda in this case. If you want to reuse the drive, you can type: if=dev/zero of=dev/sda bs=4096 This powerful command can be used to convert, copy, and destroy data. If you’re familiar with Linux or Unix, then you might already know about the built-in dd command. This handy software is available for Windows and Linux, comes with a simple GUI, and can even be installed on a live USB with its portable version. Unplug the DBAN media, reconnect your hard drives and reboot your computer.ĭBAN is the nuclear option if you want to securely wipe a hard drive but there is nothing better for getting the job done! BleachBitīleachBit is designed to securely clear caches, delete files, erase all the content of a partition or drive, compress an image or drive for storage, and reduce the size of backups.

Wait for the black Pass screen to signify completion.Select the drive from the list in the next window by pressing space.Press Enter at the blue DBAN screen to load into interactive mode.Boot your computer from the DVD or USB.Disconnect any other hard drives that you don’t want to wipe including your boot drive.Download DBAN and install it to a DVD or a USB drive.

Wipe external hard drive