Microsoft hard drive eraser

USB thumb drive selection. If the Start button is disabled, check that your removable drive has a total capacity of at least 4 GB. After the creation process is finished, the USB drive has been formatted and all binaries are copied to the USB drive. Select Success. When the Congratulations screen is displayed, you can eject and remove the thumb drive.

This thumb drive is now ready to be inserted into a Surface device, booted from, and wipe any data on the device. Figure 5. To boot your device from the USB stick follow these steps:.

Turn off your Surface device. Press and hold the Volume Down button. Press and release the Power button. Release the Volume Down button. Accept or decline the software license terms by typing Accept or Decline. While there are countless hard drive eraser software options, Stellar BitRaser is the safest choice for both professional and casual home users. This erasure software is designed with best-in-class features to help you remove data from PCs and external storage devices alike.

Stellar also has a file wiping tool — BitRaser File Eraser that can help get rid of files, folders, partitions, or clear browsing history, remove app traces or cookies beyond recovery; it literally erases photos, videos, and tax records. With secure data erasure features across drives, devices, and multiple platforms, BitRaser Drive Eraser is our recommendation for you! Free trial Visit website CCleaner. CCleaner is a great PC utility program that can also be used to erase both internal and external drives.

In addition, this Windows-friendly program also doubles as a registry cleaner , program uninstaller, startup monitoring, duplicate finder, disk analyzer, system restore, and other PC performance tools.

CCleaner can be downloaded and run from Windows; you can wipe either the free space within the drive or the entire drive. You can use CCleaner to securely erase all the contents of your drive. Although, the Pro version features can be unlocked by paying a premium price and its value for money indeed.

Check out the features and decide on the best solution to suit you. Do you want to use a great hard drive eraser software? Free trial Visit website HDShredder. This software implements the Write Zero data sanitization method; this method overwrites data once or multiple times for greater security, thus preventing data retrieval.

This free and open-source software can be downloaded as an ISO file on an external drive and can be used to permanently erase every data on an HDD.

However, in order to use the software, you need to burn the software into an ISO image file and run from an external hard drive. DBAN uses the following data erasing techniques :. HDDErase is a data eraser software that runs before booting from an external drive. It can wipe off every piece of data on a hard drive including its operating system. However, the program is a text-only program meaning that you need to press keys while performing the data erasing process.

To get started with the program, you need to firstly download the tutorial from the official download site and go through it, and then download the HDDErase package in a zipped folder before you burn the ISO image file to the external drive of your choice. This software can easily, quickly, and permanently erase all data on your hard drive, and, as its name suggests, is for data erasing.

Generally, when you format a drive volume, it is quick formatted. Use full format when you need to wipe data from the entire drive volume and get rid of sensitive data. SDelete is a Microsoft utility that erases empty storage space on a drive volume that may contain previously deleted confidential files. The utility is safe to work with, but it runs via Command Prompt terminal. To use SDelete to wipe your drives empty storage, follow these steps:.

You can increase or decrease the number of passes as per your wish. If you are familiar and conformable with Command Line tools, use SDelete. You can delete your files from your storage media and then run SDelete utility to wipe empty storage and destroy recoverable data with DoD Method 3: Secure Erasure Tool. The best way to wipe any confidential information from a Windows 10 PC is by using a secure file eraser software such as BitRaser File Eraser. You can use the software to erase any file, wipe entire drive volume, or just the free space as per various international data erasure standards.

It also features two verification methods that ensure data destruction. Use BitRaser File Eraser to wipe data that is critical and highly confidential in nature. If you want to erase C partition, the one where operating system reside, you would have to access it from the other instance of operating system from other partition, or preferably take out the drive from the computer, connect it to another computer and erase it from there.

One hard drive can have more than one partition, and if you want to erase the whole hard drive you should erase all its partitions. To learn more about disk partitioning check the wikipedia article here. Ideally, if you want to get rid of old drives in your company you can have one computer which serves for partitioning other drives, than plugging old drives you want to erase onto it by using hdd rack, usb case rack or so.

This way only one instance of Hard Drive Eraser will be installed. Before starting the erasing process double check that the partition you are about to erase actually the one you intended to erase. Erased partitions can not be recovered, otherwise this program wouldn't exist. You use Hard Drive Eraser at your own responsibility. The author of this program can not be held responsible or liable, directly or indirectly, for any loss or damage caused by the usage of this program.