Best way to format a hard drive to return back to factory state

Hardware Hub Storage
1

Any ideas on wiping a hard drive completely, no partitions is anything.

I won't be using it as a boot drive. I recently got an ssd and this hdd was my boot drive, now im going to make the ssd the boot drive.

Any help is appreciated, also if you have any tips for making the ssd a boot drive, it would help. Thanks.

2

Format the HDD as NTFS, then disconnect it from the computers, install the SSD, then boot up with your windows disk or usb and install the OS onto the SSD.

3

Ill give it a try, thanks fo the quick reply.

4

Make sure that you securely wipe the data on the drive. Formatting it does NOT get rid of all the data, it just tells the drive it's Ok to overwrite the drive. This means that anyone could use free tool to recover everything you stored on the drive. What you have to do is completely destroy all residual data and the partition table. What I would do is unplug all other drives, prepare a Linux liveCD and run this command: 

# dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=4M

This will take a while as it writes zeros to the entire drive, making recovery VERY difficult. Always triple check that you have the right drive because it will delete everything with no chance of recovery.

-Noah

2 Likes
5

Thanks

6

use DBAN - takes a good while to do its thing but works

7

I use KillDisk, don't know if its still a thing i've had the disk for ever.