Once you’ve downloaded it and created a bootable USB, insert the drive into your PC, and tell your computer to boot from the USB drive rather than your hard drive. To ensure that things run smoothly, you should also dive into your BIOS settings and make sure that your drives are set to IDE mode.ĭownload DBAN-a time-tested option for erasing HDDs that’s loved by geeks around the world despite the fact that it hasn’t been updated in years. Since you’ll be deleting the data from the drive that likely holds your PC’s operating system, most tools that wipe whole drives require you to move the program to a flash drive or create a bootable thumb drive from an. Securely erase a mechanical hard drive with DBANĪ note on whole-disk wiping software: Wiping entire drives requires slightly more complicated solutions than the easy-to-use apps mentioned previously. (I usually go with the DoD three-pass option.) Click Add Data to select the files to wipe and choose an erasure method. From there, a window pops up with the task and time-scheduling options. Just boot up the program, click the arrow next to the ‘Erase Schedule’ option at the top of the screen, and select New task. If you need to delete only specific files and folders rather than entire drives, the open-source Eraser is the tool for you. Securely erase specific files with Eraser Nevertheless, we have used all of these methods successfully in the past. If you do choose to erase your data with any of these methods, you do so at your own risk-which is why we advise making a backup before you begin. Department of Defense’s “Short” specification and for numerous militaries around the globe.

Some utilities support “Gutmann”-level protection with 35 passes, but three passes is enough for the U.S. The more times you overwrite your data, the less likely it is to be recovered.

A utility that makes three passes overwrites your drive with ones and zeroes three separate times. Each pass signifies a complete overwrite of the data. Drive-wipe utilities let you specify how many “passes” the software makes.

With that out of the way let’s talk terminology.

Hard drive eraser