How to completely wipe a HDD?
- Thread starter ellingham
- Start date
A brief intro on HDD data storage, fyi (to maybe explain the confusion)...
A HDD is structured like this - a list of what's on it (sort of like a table of contents) followed by the data itself. Normally when you delete stuff you only really delete its entry in the table of contents, because it's quicker. Windows looks only at the table of contents and concludes the data is deleted, but it's actually still sitting there on the drive and may or may not be overwritten depending on what you do with the HDD afterwards. For most purposes, including your fresh windows install, this is fine.
But all that 'deleted' data that is actually still there can be recovered by special software, or literally read straight off the platter with special equipment even if the rest of the HDD is broken. Some people want to reeeeeally remove their data so that this can't happen (e.g. companies disposing of old HDDs which might have sensitive data on them). In this case clicking doesn't do the trick because as above it only removes the table of contents entries and leaves the data there. That's where special disk cleaning software comes into use which literally writes 0s over the entire disk. If a disk is being disposed of it could also simply be physically destroyed.
Some folks assumed you might want the latter form of disk cleaning hence suggesting the special programs. For just a fresh windows install you'll be fine with a simple delete partitions and format.
A HDD is structured like this - a list of what's on it (sort of like a table of contents) followed by the data itself. Normally when you delete stuff you only really delete its entry in the table of contents, because it's quicker. Windows looks only at the table of contents and concludes the data is deleted, but it's actually still sitting there on the drive and may or may not be overwritten depending on what you do with the HDD afterwards. For most purposes, including your fresh windows install, this is fine.
But all that 'deleted' data that is actually still there can be recovered by special software, or literally read straight off the platter with special equipment even if the rest of the HDD is broken. Some people want to reeeeeally remove their data so that this can't happen (e.g. companies disposing of old HDDs which might have sensitive data on them). In this case clicking doesn't do the trick because as above it only removes the table of contents entries and leaves the data there. That's where special disk cleaning software comes into use which literally writes 0s over the entire disk. If a disk is being disposed of it could also simply be physically destroyed.
Some folks assumed you might want the latter form of disk cleaning hence suggesting the special programs. For just a fresh windows install you'll be fine with a simple delete partitions and format.