View the drives (volumes) that sit on a hard drive from the Disk Management tool in Windows.ĭownload a free data destruction program. If you haven’t been so proactive, pick from several free offline backup tools that can save your files to an external hard drive.īack up everything you want to keep sometimes several virtual drives share space on a single physical hard drive. If you’ve already been using an online backup service, you can safely assume that all your important files are already backed up online.

When the hard drive wipe is complete, there will be absolutely no way to get anything on the drive back.

This process could take several minutes to several hours depending on how big the drive is and what method you choose.īack up anything you want to keep, such as photos, software product keys, etc. If you want to make sure that your private information is gone forever, you’ll need to wipe the hard drive using special software A file recovery program or special hardware often recovers the information. When you format a hard drive or delete a partition, you’re usually only deleting the file system, making the data invisible, or no longer actively indexed, but not gone. You’ll need to take an extra step to wipe the hard drive so the data cannot be easily reconstructed later. Deleting everything does not wipe a hard drive and formatting does not usually wipe a hard drive.

To wipe a hard drive means to completely erase the drive of all its information.

Wipe hard drive windows 7