When you are selling your older used computer, giving it away or even throwing it in the dumpster outside, you should first erase the hard drive securely – also called wiping the hard drive. By wiping all the data off the hard drive you ensure that nobody will be able to recover your files from it.
Previously we published about a tool from MiniTool called Drive Wipe which allows a user to wipe the entire hard drive or a single partition from that hard drive. But if you have already installed MiniTool Partition Wizard (which is free for personal use), then you do not need any other software for wiping hard drives or partitions.
This is how you can use MiniTool Partition Wizard to wipe hard drives or partitions:
- First of all connect all the hard drives to your PC. In case of external portable hard drives, you should ensure that they are visible in Windows File Explorer.
- Launch MiniTool Partition Wizard and wait for it to detect the hard drives that you want to securely erase. You cannot select the system drive (on which Windows is installed).
- Select the target hard drive that you want to erase and click on Wipe Disk from the left sidebar. Alternatively, you can right-click on the hard drive and choose to Wipe Disk from there.
- You will be shown a number of options for wiping the hard drive – fill with zeroes, fill with ones, fill with both zeroes and ones, DoD 3 pass and DoD 7 pass.
- After choosing a hard drive erasing method, you can click on the OK button to proceed.
- It will take a while for the hard drive will be wiped out. Typically for a 1TB hard drive, it will take 1 hour of work before the target hard drive can be said to lose all the data.