How to completely wipe a hard drive

KnightPlutonian · Jul 30, 2016

I'm planning on entirely rebuilding my PC, but I'd like to use my current HDD as another storage device inside while installing a new copy of Windows 10 on an SSD (and also purchasing another HDD to use for further storage if that matters). How can I completely wipe my current hard drive so that it can be reused from an empty storage device? Are there going to be any issues that arise from this process? So far I've only ever used one hard drive, so will there be any differences in accessing the hard drives other than my SSD (also, will they appear as C: Drive (SSD) and D/E: Drive (HDDs) when browsing files)?

Martell1977 · Jul 30, 2016

Just connect the old drive and boot into windows. Open "This PC", right click on the drive and click on "format", this will wipe the drive.

There shouldn't be any conflict as the SSD is set as the boot drive and Windows will just assign a drive letter to the old one as a slave drive. the drive letters are usually in order, so If you have an SSD, DVD Burner and 2 HDDs, it should come out something like; SSD=C:, HDD1=D, HDD2=E and DVD=F. These can easily be changed but never change the C:, it creates more issues that it's worth.

Rabmac · Jul 30, 2016

You can use Darik's Boot and Nuke to wipe the drive: http://www.dban.org/

I would suggest just doing 1 pass.

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How to completely wipe a hard drive

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Martell1977

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Rabmac

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