How to securely wipe a hard drive before selling
Deleting files or formatting does not always remove data for good. A disk-wiping tool overwrites the whole drive so the old data is very hard to recover.
Steps
- Back up anything you want to keep.
- Boot from a wiping tool such as DBAN on a USB drive.
- Select the correct disk.
- Choose a wipe method and start. Large drives can take hours.
Important
- Wiping is permanent. Double-check the disk.
- DBAN is designed for traditional hard drives. SSDs use different methods such as secure erase.
See our disk, rescue and security tools.