Completely wipe data from Windows hard drive

When you are getting ready to dump a computer or give it away to someone else, do you delete your personal data?

You should.

However, many people erroneously believe if they delete data, it's gone. It isn't! It's just removed from view, and anyone with very mild technical skills can recover it.

Fortunately Windows has a built in tool to completely wipe free space from a drive. Note that this does NOT delete files which you didn't already remove. It just makes sure that deleted files are unrecoverable, which is what you should want when your computer lands in someone else's hands.

To do it, it's very simple:

1) Go to the search bar and type cmd and press enter (this brings up a command prompt)

2) Type this at the command prompt: cipher /w:c

3) Wait awhile. Maybe go to sleep or to work, and leave it running. It could take several hours.


If you're wiping a drive other than C:, you should change the letter in #2 to whichever drive that is. So for a D: drive you would type cipher /w:d instead of cipher /w:c.