How to clean a hard drive

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2 A simple alternative to clean your hard drive

3 Was Windows Disk Cleanup What You Are Really Looking For?

How to clean hard drive? Cleaning your PC means completely erase the unit of all its information. Deleting everything that formatting doesn’t always delete from a hard drive. You will have to take an extra step for clean the hard drive completely.

When format a hard drive o si delete a partition, usually only the file system is deleted, making the data invisible or no longer noticeably indexed, but not deleted. A file recovery program or with special hardware you can easily retrieve information. If you want to make sure of clean the hard drive completely, you will have to clean hard drive using special software.

How to clean the hard drive

Time Required: this process could take anywhere from a few minutes to several hours depending on how large the drive is and what software / method you choose to clean.

Back up anything you want to keep, such as photos, software product serials, etc. When the hard drive cleanup is complete, it won’t be there absolutely no way to recover anything on the disk.

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How do I clean my PC disk?

Download DBAN (Darik’s Boot and Nuke) a free data destruction program. The program will work great because it can be used for wipe a hard drive from outside of Windows, a necessary feature if desired clean hard drive on which Windows is installed.

DBAN does not wipe solid state drives, only traditional drives. If you need to erase an SSD, you will need to find another program.

Wiping hard drive is independent of the operating system, provided you use one of the boot tools from our list. This means that you can use the same general process for erase a hard drive if you have Windows 10, Windows 8, Windows 7, Windows Vista, Windows XP, Linux or any other PC operating system.

There are several ways to completely erase a hard drive, but using data shredding software is the simplest and still allows you to reuse your hard drive.

So let’s continue, complete the steps required to install the software or, in the case of a bootable program like DBAN, get the ISO image on a CD or DVD disc or a USB device such as a flash drive:

if you are using a CD or DV, this usually involves burning the ISO image to a disc and booting from the disc to run the program.
if you are using a flash drive or other USB drive, this typically involves burning the ISO image to the USB device and booting from that USB drive to get started.

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Clean hard drive according to the program instructions.

If you stay cleaning your laptop hard drive, make sure your laptop is plugged in, or at the very least, has a full charge. The total time required to complete HDD cleaning depends on the size of the drive and the speed of the computer.

After properly cleaned hard drive, you can be sure that any information on the drive is gone forever.

Now you can install Windows on the drive, create a new partition, sell or give away the hard drive or computer, recycle or dispose of it, restore backup files, or whatever else you need to do.

A simple alternative to clean your hard drive

Starting with Windows Vista, the formatting process has changed and a single zero write pass is applied to each standard (not fast) format. In other words, a very simple c disk cleanup is performed during a format.

Be a single write pass zero it is enough for you, consider your drive erased after a normal format in Windows 10, 8, 7 or Vista. If you want something even safer, follow the hard drive cleaning instructions above.

This is a deletion only of the partition you are formatting. If you have more than one partition on a physical hard drive, you will need to format those additional drives as well if you want to treat the entire physical drive as “erased”.

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Was Windows Disk Cleanup What You Are Really Looking For?

If what you really want to do is make sure that the files you delete are indeed deleted and are not recoverable with special tools, a data erasing program is more than what you need. Check out ours list of free software programs for the destruction of files with programs that “destroy” individual files as needed.

Many of these destruction programs also perform what is called clearing free space, that is the deletion of all the “empty” space on the hard disk. The purpose is to ensure that the files you have already deleted are actually deleted forever.