How to Wipe a Drive on Windows

If you use a Hard drive, you might know that deleted data can be recovered using a third-party app. This is possible even when users delete items from the Recycle Bin. This happens because the deleted files are Marked as deleted on an additional magnet drive, making data recovery easy.

However, this doesn’t happen with modern solid-state drives, which use TRIM by default. This ensures that deleted files are deleted immediately. External storage devices, such as USB flash drives, also don’t support TRIM, which means deleted files can be recovered. To prevent file recovery, you must wipe a drive; a simple format will not work. Here’s how you can wipe a drive.

1. Using the Format option

To wipe an entire drive, you must perform a full format instead of a Quick format. Here’s what you need to do.

1. Open File Explorer and right-click on the Drive you want to wipe.

2. Select Format

3. Uncheck the ‘Quick Format’ option and click Start.

This will take a bit of time to complete. Once completed, the Drive will be wiped.

2. How to Wipe only Free Space

If you don’t want to remove the content, you can wipe only free space. This will the wipe only the free space, overwriting it with zeros.

1. Open Windows search and type in Powershell.

2. Right-click PowerShell and select Run as administrator.

3. Execute the given command. Replace the X with the drive letter you want to wipe.

cipher /w:X:\

For example: cipher /w:G:\

3. Wipe Your System Drive

You can use the built-in Reset this PC option to wipe your Windows system drive. Here’s how.

1. Open Windows settings and click the ‘Update & Security’ option.

2. Click on the Recovery option.

3. Click the Get Started button behind Reset this PC.

4. On the Reset this PC dialog box, select ‘Remove Everything’

5. Follow the on-screen instructions to complete the reset process.

This will remove everything stored on your System Drive. So, ensure a proper backup file is ready before performing the System reset.

4. Wipe a drive on Windows via Command Prompt

You can even use the Command Prompt utility to clean a hard drive on the Windows operating system.

1. Type the command prompt on the Windows 11 Seainh. Right-click on the CMD and select Run as administrator.

2. Execute the command: diskpart

3. Execute the command: list disk

4. This will list all drives you have. Note down the Disk number.

5. Select the disk drive you want to wipe. For the selection, execute this command: select disk X

Note: Replace X with the disk number you want to wipe. For example, select disk 2.

6. Type clean and press Enter.

7. This will format your disk. Now you need to format the disk in NTFS file format & assign it a drive letter to make it usable. For that, execute these commands one by one:

create partition primary

select partition 2

active

format FS=NTFS quick

assign letter=X

exit

Important: In the 5th command, replace the X with the drive letter you want to assign to your drive.

The above methods will wipe a drive on Windows. Wiping a drive is very different from formatting it. If you have any doubts, let us know in the comment box below.

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