How to Wipe a Hard Drive Clean and Start Over

Are you looking to clean your disk and delete everything on it? This tutorial will show you how to wipe a hard drive clean and start over using the clean all command in Windows. By following these steps, you can safely sell, throw away, or give away your hard drive without any issues.

To get started, right-click on your Windows icon and select “Command Prompt Admin.” Alternatively, you can search for Command Prompt and select “Run as Administrator.” Once Command Prompt is open, type in “disk part” and then “list disk” to see the different disks available. Select the disk you want to wipe by typing in “select disk” followed by the number of the disk you want to wipe.

Once you’ve selected the correct disk, type in “clean all” and hit enter. This will completely wipe the disk and delete all partitions on it. Note that the clean all command can take around 1 hour per 320 gigabytes, so it may take a while to clean your disk.

After the process is finished, you can launch Disk Management to initialize and start using the disk. To do this, right-click on the Windows icon and select “Disk Management.” You may see a prompt to initialize the disk. Choose GPT, which is the recommended option for most new drives.

To start using the disk, right-click on it and select “New Simple Volume.” Follow the wizard to allocate all the space on the disk, assign a letter to the drive, and format the volume using NTFS. You can name the volume anything you want and select a default allocation unit size. Once you’ve completed these steps, your hard drive is ready to use.

In conclusion, wiping a hard drive clean and starting over is an easy process that anyone can do with the right instructions. By following these steps, you can safely and securely clean your disk and start using it again.