How to Securely Erase a Rewriteable CD or DVD Without Any Special Tool

There are so many tools out there for securely erasing files, folders, partitions or even entire disks if the hard disks or the solid state disks are concerned. In fact, we have reviewed many of such high quality secure erasing tools like Jihosoft Eraser or Eraser Drop,  that can overwrite the data on your disks using very strong algorithms like Guttmann, USDoD and many more. But none of these tools really work with optical disks. Even Windows does not fully erase the contens of re-writable CD/DVD disks. There are some special tools like Active DVD Eraser that can actually securely erase re-writable CD/DVD disks without much problem. But what if you want to quickly erase the re-writable optical disks securely without using any special software?

There is a simpler way using which you can overwrite the data with some other data easily in Windows. Here is how:

  1. The first thing that you have to do is notice the size or capacity of the re-writable disks in question. You can find their capacity by looking at the disk properties in Windows File Explorer. But in most of the disks, the disk capacity and the write speeds are printed on them.Securely Erase Re-writable CD/DVD Disks
  2. If you are erasing a DVD-RW then navigate to http://ftp.uni-kl.de/pub/linux/knoppix-dvd/ to download the 4 GB DVD ISO image of Knoppix Linux. If you are trying to erase data from CD-RW, then visit http://ftp.uni-kl.de/pub/linux/knoppix-dvd/CD/ and download the 700 MB CD ISO image. You can also Ubuntu Linux CD/DVD images.
  3. Insert the CD/DVD disk, that you want to securely erase, into your CD/DVD Writer.
  4. Right-click on the downloaded ISO image and select Burn disc image from the context-menu.Securely Erase Re-writable CD/DVD Disks
  5. Click on the Burn button and wait for the process to finish. It might ask you to erase the disk before continuing – in that case, choose to erase and proceed.Securely Erase Re-writable CD/DVD Disks
  6. Once the disk is burned with the downloaded ISO disk images, you can toss it away as the data has been overwritten and now nobody can read your personal data from these CD-RW/DVD-RW disks anymore.