Wipe a hard drive properly for re-sale, from within Windows?

King Mustard · 29 Dec 2015 at 11:16

I have a 320 GB laptop hard drive that I want to wipe (properly; not just a simple reformat) before I sell it.

I've put it into a USB enclosure.

What Windows software do you recommend I use to wipe a hard drive?

Disco_P · 29 Dec 2015 at 15:11

You can use the format command within command prompt to write zeroes to the drive. This should prevent software based recovery.

Here is an explanation. Start at step 7 for formatting within windows. It'll take a couple hours to do a single pass on USB as it needs to sequentially write the data.

Philtor · 29 Dec 2015 at 21:47

I would suggest using DBAN or Kill Disk.

AtaRo · 29 Dec 2015 at 23:21

Ccleaner builtin drive wiper with options for single pass up to very complex 35 passes.