how to wipe a windows 10 computer before selling

If you only ever really played games or finished school work on your computer, there’s probably little risk in using a factory reset as your primary form of data wiping.īut if you own a company and complete that work on a computer, you may have employees’ social security numbers on the hard drive, for example. Machines wiped in this manner meet all of our data destruction protocols.Context is still key. if you're sitting at the machine, you can watch windows start to glitch for 15-30 seconds before it bluescreens (because it no longer has a system disk), and then never recovers. If they're online, I can issue a secure erase from the management function, which does nothing more than generate a new encryption key and overwrite the existing one. This causes Windows to securely delete the encryption key, and now all data that has ever been stored on that drive is mathematically unrecoverable gibberish-even if it was spared out-and you can dispose of it safely.įor the past few years, I've been issuing Self-encrypting Drives (SEDs) to my users, which are managed with centralized software. That means that no sensitive data will EVER be stored on it in a manner that will be recoverable once the encryption key has been deleted.Īssuming you're using Bitlocker on a Windows machine, all you have to do prior to disposal is use Disk Management (from another machine or something like a WinPE boot drive) to delete the partition. It doesn't help OP, but for others to make this easier in the future, the best way to ensure complete data destruction with modern drives is to encrypt the drive BEFORE you start using it. Again, not for computers that store the nuclear launch codes, but data thieves have far lower-hanging fruit than drives that have been erased this way. And that does perform a more thorough erase, where zeros are written to the drive (see. It's like taking a filing cabinet and destroying the manila folders, but not shredding the financial statements inside the folders.īeyond 'Remove everything,' there's an option to 'clean the drive,' which is what I was referring to.

It does not make it 'more difficult to recover the data.' It only makes it inconvenient because you don't know where anything is. However, the actual data is still left behind on the hard drive. The option is 'Remove everything.' Your files will be deleted, so it will look like there is no data there.

I forget exactly what it's called, but it's adequate for most if you're not storing nuclear codes on your computer. When you reset Windows 10, there's an option which makes it more difficult to recover the data.

How to wipe a windows 10 computer before selling