my computer is broken and i want to clear my hard drive

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SuperSoph_WD
Hey there, Devin!

I'd suggest to use a third-party software to write zeros (erase) your drive. Most HDD manufacturers have such utilities on their websites in the support page. Writing zeros to a drive is recommended any time an operating system is to be reinstalled on a boot drive or whenever a blank drive is desired. You might have two options there: Quick Erase and Full Erase.
The quick erase just changes a small part of the HDD to indicate that the drive is empty and ready for writing, but most of it remains unchanged. This means that the old data is not actually gone until it is overwritten by something else.
The full erase actually goes through the whole drive and changes all areas back to the 'unwritten' state. It takes...
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SuperSoph_WD

SuperSoph_WD

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Jul 30, 2014
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Hey there, Devin!

I'd suggest to use a third-party software to write zeros (erase) your drive. Most HDD manufacturers have such utilities on their websites in the support page. Writing zeros to a drive is recommended any time an operating system is to be reinstalled on a boot drive or whenever a blank drive is desired. You might have two options there: Quick Erase and Full Erase.
The quick erase just changes a small part of the HDD to indicate that the drive is empty and ready for writing, but most of it remains unchanged. This means that the old data is not actually gone until it is overwritten by something else.
The full erase actually goes through the whole drive and changes all areas back to the 'unwritten' state. It takes longer, but helps to ensure that no data on the drive can later be retrieved using Data Recovery methods.

Good luck! Hope this was helpful! :)
SuperSoph_WD
 
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