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Complete guide to wiping your computers Hard Drive!
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Complete guide to wiping your computers Hard Drive!Posted:

Plucky
  • Summer 2023
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Joined: Nov 20, 201311Year Member
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Joined: Nov 20, 201311Year Member
Posts: 313
Reputation Power: 885
HOW TO WIPE YOUR COMPUTER'S HARD DRIVE


About

Wiping hard drives I feel are a common thing now a days and need to be addressed. So today I will be making a tutorial for people that don't know how to do this or need some guidance on doing so. So with that set, let me give some more background on what it is used for!

Background

Wiping is used for various things besides destroying data on your p.c. It can be used if you are selling your old p.c, removing viruses, maybe your p.c may be slow, or maybe even a fresh OS install, just so your computer doesn't have anything to worry about after a new OS has be installed. Now we will talk about how to get started.

Getting Started

Now, there will be something's to download but its nothing too crazy and if you are pretty tech savvy then no worry, your good! However I will be explaining how to anyway with as much pictures and detail as possible, for the newbies. I will have what you should do listed in chronological order below.





1). Download Darik's Boot & Nuke software. This software is popular, if not the most popular program to wipe your computer! At least I think so. Any way this will be doing all your work and there is different settings once you boot it up, but we will talk about that later, as here is the link: [ Register or Signin to view external links. ] .

2). One you have done step #1 you will have to download one more thing which is UNetBootin. This allows you to run your USB to run as a bootable disk in a sense or a live disk without burning it on a CD. I will explain the reset later, but for now here is the link the link: [ Register or Signin to view external links. ] .

3). Make sure you have a USB on hand. It can be anything just make sure it is over 2GB, just to make sure you have enough space!

4). One you have downloaded and met the requirements above, then we can continue. First this there is to do is to make sure your USB is plugged into the computer and has nothing on it. It should look like the following image below:

[ Register or Signin to view external links. ]

5). Once you make sure that is set then open up UNetBootin, and it should look like this:

[ Register or Signin to view external links. ]

Once opened select Diskimage, keep it on ISO, and click the browse button the one with 3 little dots. It should look something like this:

[ Register or Signin to view external links. ]

Make sure in UNetBootin, that you have the proper disk selected, and drive as well
[ Register or Signin to view external links. ]

6). Alright, now that we got that out of the way, we can turn your USB into a bootable device! Now find you copy of Darik's Boot & Nuke. It should look something like this:

[ Register or Signin to view external links. ]

7). Once it is selected into UnetBootin, then click ok. It should look something like so:

[ Register or Signin to view external links. ]

8). After you are done, you should see a screen that looks like this:

[ Register or Signin to view external links. ]

Click "Restart Now", and you are on your way to being finished! Now once your computer is back on make sure you go into the BIOS or Boot Menu, by pressing F12(Boot Menu) or F2 (BIOS), this may varies from other computers. Then make sure you find the name of your USB and choose your USB to be the main booting device in stead of you hard drive. Once done your computer will restart again and you will be prompted with a menu that has a bunch of quick commands. All you have to do is press "ENTER", and it should look something like this:

[ Register or Signin to view external links. ]

Once done loading you should come to another menu. This menu will have a list of all you drives or hard drives. Make sure you select the right one you would like to wipe it should look something like this:

[ Register or Signin to view external links. ]

After you choose, click the "SPACE" bar and should see [wipe] right next to the selected drive.

[ Register or Signin to view external links. ]

Then press "ENTER" or "F10". After that you are finished and it should look something like this:

[ Register or Signin to view external links. ]

Just to mentions there are different types of passes you can use to insure your security and to make sure there is absolutely no data on your hard drive:

    Quick Erase
- If you just want to erase your hard drive to install a new operating system I would use this.

    Gutmann
- This is a algorithm for securely deleting or erasing data, and used for various applications in erasing data.

    DoD Short
- This consists of 3 passes and is more of your medium/high security level to wiping your drive. Nobody can really pull and information after performing this step.

    DOD 5220.22-M
- This consists of 7 passes. Basically if you want something to never be recovered then I would perform this. This is a high security pass and will completely wipe your hard drive clean no matter what was on it.




Thanks for reading, took me a while to write this up and I might need some more time to fix any issues with the tutorial. Anyway's thanks for reading I will continue to update this thread and if there are and issues you can always P.M me or post below and I will reply back! One more thing, this is compatible with P.C, Mac, Linux, and Other Linux Distro's.

P.s- Some images regarding the BIOS are not my mine, because I didn't have a computer at the moment to do this on besides the one I am on now! However I will be updating it with my own pictures. However most of the pictures are mine and the tutorial was written my me. Now that I got that out of my way thanks for reading!


Last edited by Plucky ; edited 4 times in total

The following 10 users thanked Plucky for this useful post:

OMP (02-11-2016), Oozy (02-11-2016), m8 (02-09-2016), 9nty (02-09-2016), Pro (02-09-2016), AR15 (02-08-2016), OG (02-08-2016), HTTK (02-08-2016), Cessna172 (02-08-2016), oui (02-08-2016)
#2. Posted:
HTTK
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This is a great tutorial!

I hope it is stickied as it would be a shame to see it sink down.
#3. Posted:
Plucky
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HTTK wrote This is a great tutorial!

I hope it is stickied as it would be a shame to see it sink down.


I hope not! Took me forever to write this up!
#4. Posted:
Xaldin
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I have not needed to do this for anything yet but it is a great tutorial for someone who has not done this before. well done
#5. Posted:
Plucky
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Xaldin wrote I have not needed to do this for anything yet but it is a great tutorial for someone who has not done this before. well done


Mostly made this topic because there are people whom are maybe trying to do this. If you know how to already then great! You never know when you can refer back to this!
#6. Posted:
OG
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Im certain this will be helpful to me in the future

Thanks bud
#7. Posted:
Plucky
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UZl wrote Im certain this will be helpful to me in the future

Thanks bud


No problem man! Thanks for the thanks as well!
#8. Posted:
C4
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Motto: Yamborghini: Shawn the pedos are pedoing again #BanMaze
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Motto: Yamborghini: Shawn the pedos are pedoing again #BanMaze
This is an awesome guide to wiping your HD, I just learned how to do this last month in class.
#9. Posted:
AR15
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Great guide and should help a ton of users out. Sticky inbound, perhaps?
#10. Posted:
Plucky
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AR15 wrote
Great guide and should help a ton of users out. Sticky inbound, perhaps?


Maybe, it would be a great thing to have on this section and help people out.
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