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How to wipe a windows computer
How to wipe a windows computer






It might take a few hours to complete the process but is a very secure way of doing so. This will write the data to the disk several times. Search for the Erase tab security options and click 7-pass Erase. To initiate the recovery partition, hold down the command and R keys as the computer restarts and open Disk Utility. If your machine is running Lion or Mountain Lion, a system disk isn't required, but for earlier Macs you will need one. Wiping a Mac has broadly similar principles and is very easy to do. This will take a few hours but will make sure that there are no files recoverable from the disk. Lastly, you will be asked if you want to clean the drives. If you have more than one drive on your laptop, you will be asked if you want files removed from all drives, and as a safety option this is the best method. In this case, choose the Remove Everything option to, surprisingly, get rid of everything. In order to restore Windows 10 back to a pristine state you will have to follow the set of instructions which can be found in the applicable selection you just clicked on. Simply go to Start>Settings>Update & Security>Recovery and click Get Started and choose the applicable selection. It doesn’t work with solid state drives, however, so if you need to wipe an SSD, DBAN’s developer recommends Blancco Drive Eraser (which is available as trial version and costs around A$30). A third-party tool like DBAN is also the only way to securely wipe a computer running Windows 7, Vista or XP, which don’t offer the same tools as Windows 8 or later (see below).īut DBAN doesn’t need to run in any particular operating system, so it can be used to wipe just about any computer with a traditional hard disk drive. And among the free tools available, we recommend DBAN, which offers a number of advanced data sanitisation methods. Use a third-party data destruction toolĪ specialised data destruction tool is the most secure way of wiping a computer, barring destroying the physical drive itself. Windows 10 has both features and adds the ability to backup and restore system images. Mac OS, of course, offers Time Machine or you can copy files manually. You can use the Windows Backup feature in Windows 7 or File History in Windows 8. To backup you can simply connect an external drive to the laptop and drag files and folders to it.

how to wipe a windows computer

Once you have connected the external drive to the laptop you want to wipe, you can check that it is big enough to store all the data you need.

how to wipe a windows computer

If everything is stored on one drive (usually the C: drive in Windows, right-click on the drive icon to see how much data is taking up space there. You will need to figure out how much storage you need.








How to wipe a windows computer