How to Wipe a Hard Drive (Step-by-Step Guide)

Let’s start out with the basics. Wiping a hard drive. Sure you’ve heard the term, but what exactly does it mean? Most people think that this just means deleting all the files on your computer, and they’re right to a certain degree. Wiping a hard drive basically means erasing all the data from a hard disk. Now, there are certain methods that you can use to achieve this. Most people think that simply deleting everything on their hard drives or formatting their drives wipes it clean. Are they right? Kinda. While these methods do work to a certain degree, the data erased is still recoverable. This means financial information, credit card numbers, bank numbers, login information, passwords, and other personal information is still there and can be retrieved by bad guys with special tools. How do you avoid this? You wipe your hard disks using a method called disk wiping. Disk wiping basically overwrites all your data on the drive with either a 1 or a 0, and then reformats it. Depending on the number of times you instruct your wiping program to do this (called passes), you can make your drive more or less secure. The more passes, the more secure your disk and your information.

Well, you can’t just snap your fingers and your drive is magically wiped. In order to wipe your drives, you’ll need a few things:

• A hard drive that needs wiping

• Image-Burning Program

• DBAN CD (find .iso at http://www.dban.org/download)

• Flash Drive or other Backup Device

• An Operating System reinstall disk

• Patience

To start out, make sure you have everything you need. Once you start the wipe, you’ll be without a computer, so make sure you have these directions printed out or you have another computer handy.

1. Back up any and all information you’d like to keep. I’d suggest making sure you have your music, pictures, and important documents backed up, because you won’t be able to recover them once you wipe your hard drive.
2. Burn a DBAN disk. You can find the .iso file you need at http://www.dban.org/download. Once you download it, you can use an image-burning program to burn it to a CD. I suggest ImgBurn (http://imgburn.com/) to burn this file. It’s fast, it’s free, and it’s easy to use.
3. Insert your DBAN disk into your computer and shut it down. Start up your computer again and hit F12 to enter a one-time start-up menu. Select the CD option and watch as DBAN starts up. Once you get to the first menu, hit [Enter] to enter the interactive menu.
4. Once in the Interactive menu, choose which hard drive you would like to wipe and hit [M]. Select the type of wipe you would like to perform. If you are just casually wiping your drive, I would suggest 1-3 passes, if you have valuable or touchy information on your drive, I would suggest 7+. Hit [Enter] when finished.
5. If you are ready to begin wiping, hit the [Space] bar to select the drive you would like to wipe.PLEASE NOTE: ONCE THE PROGRAM BEGINS, IT IS IRREVERSIBLE. ALL OF YOUR FILES AND OPERATING SYSTEM WILL BE GONE. USE PROGRAM AT OWN DISCRESSION. Once you are sure you are ready to wipe, hit [F10] and you are on your way.

The amount of time it will take generally depends on the size of the disk you are wiping and which wiping method you use. The speed of your hard drive also helps speed things up a good deal. All drives take different times, it all just depends. I’ve wiped many computers before and some have taken as little as 30 minutes and others as long as a day. Just be patient and bear with it.

Once DBAN finishes, a little screen will pop-up notifying you that the program has completed. Just shut down your computer and pop in your Windows or Linux re-installation disk. After this point, the disk will guide you through and before long, you’ll have a nice, clean, fresh operating system installed again. After moving your files back over, your computer will be as good as new.