Startups

Technology

Reviews

Apps

Wiping A Hard Drive Has Never Been Easier With These Steps!

www.techsunk.com

Startups

Technology

Reviews

Apps

Hard drives are an extremely important part of your professional and personal life for storing all your official and personal data and to protect your data from a deletion in case of a virus attack or any malfunction on your computer.

Now as much we associate the importance of hard drives to data storage and protection, we must also emphasize how important it is to completely wipe a hard drive, too.

Now, why is it important to delete a hard drive you may wonder? Well, many reasons can answer your question and let us start with the most important reason.

Reasons to Wipe a Hard Drive 

Here are the reasons to wipe a hard drive:

  1. Deleting and cleaning your hard drive leads to an increase in the performance of your computer. Yes, you will notice a significant change in your computer drive once you wipe a hard drive. When you visit different websites and open documents, there are thousands of files and old data that gets downloaded on your computer. This data can be adware, malware or remnants of old virus programs due to which your computer system keeps on freezing.
  1. If you wish to get back to the factory settings and make your computer all-new once again, then it is highly recommended to erase and wipe a hard drive. This also stands true when you wish to switch to a different operating system or update your windows version.
  2. If you are re-selling your hardware, the best is to wipe the hard drive entirely so that your data does not fall into the hands of a stranger.
  3. The most important thing you need to realise is that formatting or deleting your data is not a way to secure your hardware at all. When you perform any of these actions what the computer does is that it just marks the particular file deleted and waits for another file to re-write over it. Therefore, your data can easily fall into the wrong hands.

How to Wipe a Hard Drive?

Now that we have learnt and known the importance of wiping a hard drive, let us also learn about how to wipe a hard drive. Now, with different operating systems and their versions installed in our computer, the method to completely wipe a hard drive also differs.

Therefore, keeping this in mind let us learn different ways to wipe a hard drive in different operating systems. 

How to Wipe a Hard Drive in Windows 10

If you use the Windows 10 operating system on your computer as most of us do, then you can easily wipe a hard drive and reset your personal computer at the same time with the help of the recovery tool. Here is how you do it:

  1. Open Settings on your computer.
  2. Go to the update and security option there.
  3. Go to recovery from there.
  4. Click on the get started option under the reset pc.
  5. Next, you will be asked to either keep everything or delete everything. Click on delete/remove everything.
  6. Click on the reset option.

This starts the reset process, completely wipes the hard drive and reinstalls the window again on your computer. 

Wipe a Hard Drive in Windows 8.1

If you are a Windows 8.1 user, then you do not have to worry a lot about the methods as it follows the same steps as in windows 10 with little differences here and there. Let us also know the process on how to wipe a drive in windows 8.1:

  1. Go to the settings option of your computer.
  2. Tap on the change PC  settings on your computer.
  3. From there go to the update and recovery option.
  4. Now, click on the recovery key.
  5. Here, start the process of wiping the hard drive under the option of removing everything and reinstall windows and click on next.
  6. You will be asked whether you want to completely delete your data or you wish to keep everything. Make an informed decision and move further with the process.
  7. Click on the reset button and start the process.

The rest of the procedure is similar to the windows 10 cleaning procedure. Your entire PC resets and windows are re-installed.

Wipe a Hard Drive in Windows 7

The process might differ from the above two if you use windows 7 on your computer. If you think that your windows are lagging too much then you can wipe your hard disk to make it work like before. Here is how to wipe a hard drive in windows 7.

Now before you start with the process, you will either need a recovery partition or an installation disc.

  1. Open the control panel on your computer.
  2. Click on the recovery option.
  3. Next, you will see the option of the advanced recovery option. Here you choose how you want to wipe your hard disk.
  4. Now depending on the method, you choose (recovery partition or installation disc) in the previous step.
  5. Click on skip if you are asked for backing up your files.
  6. Click on restart.

Now the windows will re-install and will completely wipe your hard drive, thereby making your PC ready to use like before. 

Latest Articles

Loading...