Wipe hdd before handing off

[Sojiro1]

Heyo
Gonna give my friend old hdd and ssd.
How do I completely erase a hdd.. thanks!
*hopes it is point and click*

 

[Boogieman_WD]

Hey there, Sojiro1.

Well if you're not worried that s/he might be trying to recover any personal data from your drive, you could just access Disk Management: How to access Disk Management in Windows to manage hard drives and delete the partitions. Just click with the right mouse button on the partition you wish to remove and select "delete volume". You'd have to do that for each partition on the HDD (if it has more than one). After you do this, the HDD will be left with it's storage space as "Unallocated". This way when your friend gets the HDD s/he can create new partitions and format them.

Hope that helps. Please let me know how it goes.
Boogieman_WD

 

[DookieDraws]

Unless you're paranoid about something, simply reformat them.

 

[Sojiro1]

Thanks!
It's my cousin and I'm helping him so I'll be fine now ^_^

 

[Boogieman_WD]

Awesome Sojiro

Unless you're paranoid about something, simply reformat them.

Hi DookieDraws.

Just FYI if you're ever in a similar situation, but you do need the data wiped off completely. In cases like this a simple format will not do much about getting rid of your data. Formatting just changes the file system, which means that the data is still there and intact, but "invisible" for the OS. So if the HDD is in good condition, you should still be able to recover all the data from it, even if it's formatted (as long as none of the data is overwritten). In order for you to make sure that there's no data left for anyone to retrieve, you'd have to do a low level format (a.k.a. Write Zeros), which can be done either via DISKPART or a 3rd party program.

Cheers!