It works for internal system drives, external USB hard drives, flash drives, SD cards, and whatever else you might want to securely wipe. The Disk Utility tool included with Mac OS X can securely wipe drives. With Eraser installed, you can right-click a drive in Windows Explorer, point to “Eraser,” and select “Erase” to erase it. You could also use this on Windows 10, 8.1, or 8 if you’d rather not use the format command in a terminal. To wipe a USB drive, SD card, or another drive, you can use a program like Eraser. You can then reinstall Windows on that drive and get back to factory-default settings with a wiped drive, or just dispose of the drive after overwriting it with junk data - whatever you want to do.ĭBAN is a bootable environment, so you can throw it on a USB drive or burn it to a disc and boot it up on a PC that doesn’t even have an operating system to ensure that PC’s drive is wiped. If you’re still using Windows 7, you can boot up your computer using DBAN (also known as Darik’s Boot and Nuke) and use it to wipe an internal drive. Windows 7 doesn’t contain any integrated disk-wiping features. Windows 7 (and Computers Without Operating Systems) In theory, you should only need a single pass, but you might want to perform a few extra to be safe. Doing this to solid-state storage can decrease the life of your drive, so try not to use more passes than you really need. You could enter “/p:3” to perform three passes, and so on. For example, “/p:1” will perform a single pass on the drive, overwriting every sector once. The “/p” switch tells Windows how many passes to use. Replace “x:” with the drive letter of the drive you want to format, being very careful to select the correct drive or you’ll wipe another drive. To do this, launch a Command Prompt window as administrator by right-clicking the Start button and selecting “Command Prompt (Admin).” Type the following command into the window:

Bootable hard drive utility