Accidentally wipe your hard drive and the data all erased? Follow what it demonstrates to you and you can get data back from your wiped computer hard disk.
Many families have welcomed new PCs into their homes, thanks to back-to-school and Labor Day sales, leaving older computers to be. That makes this a good time to learn how to perform a factory reset.What is a factory reset? That's when you wipe your computer's hard drive and reinstall its operating system. Doing this reverts your computer to its pristine state, deleting all your personal information, applications, and files in the process.Getting rid of a computer without performing a reset could put your data in the wrong hands—and you and your family at risk for identity theft.Can't I just delete the files? Matt Ham, owner of repair service company Computer Repair Doctor, explains that manually purging files isn’t enough.“You're likely to forget things like passwords saved in browsers and personal data in the deleted items folder. Or you can miss deleting some important files altogether,' he says. 'Reinstalling your system before sale is a much safer alternative.”.
Google, Apple, and Microsoft have made doing a reset simple for computers running their operating systems. Once all your data has been transferred to your and you're sure it's working properly, follow the steps listed below for your particular operating system.For most situations, wiping a computer with a reset will be sufficient to safeguard personal data. So if you're handing off your old computer to a friend or sibling, or donating it to a well-known charitable organization, the steps listed below should suffice.But, to be clear, this won't deter a truly determined hacker who is intent on retrieving your files.To be completely safe, you can remove the hard drive from your PC or Mac before you let the computer out of your hands. Do that if you're selling it on eBay or know that you have highly sensitive material on the hard drive. (The gold standard in hard-drive security consists of using a pointy nail and a few swift swings of a hammer.
Just make sure you're wearing safety glasses.)Here's how to do a factory reset with the most popular computer operating systems. Before wiping your computer, make sure to back up important files to an external drive or the cloud and disable iCloud features, such as Find My Mac, Messages, and Apple Music.You should also. Transferring these collections of account names and passwords onto your new machine will save you the hassle of re-entering the WiFi password at the local coffee shop or the login info for online retailers.Begin your factory reset by restarting your computer. During startup, hold down the Shift + Option + Command + R keys until the Apple logo appears. This will reinstall the operating system that came with your Mac. (Alternatively, you can hold Command + R to reinstall the latest MacOS installed on your Mac or Option + Command + R to upgrade to the latest version of the OS compatible with your computer.)Once you've done that, the Utilities window will pop up in the middle of your screen.
Open the Disk Utility and erase your built-in hard disk. Make sure to select the disk, not the volume name listed beneath it. Then select MacOS Extended (Journaled) format and quit Disk Utility when the process ends.To finish the reset, navigate back to the Utilities window and choose Reinstall MacOS (or OSX) to reinstall the original operating system.After the reinstall, the Mac will begin the setup process. This should look familiar if you've set up this computer before.
If you’re selling your computer, you can skip setup by pressing Command + Q and let the new owner complete that process. Users have the easiest time wiping their laptops. Unlike Apple and Windows users, most of their files are already stored online, in Google Drive. So there's little to back up before you begin the process.To start a factory reset, click on your account photo.
Open the Settings menu and scroll down to the Advanced section. From there, find the Powerwash section and click on the icon.
This will prompt a restart, which will flush away all your personal information.If you're ready to sell or donate the computer, don't log back in—the next person who logs in becomes the Chromebook's primary user. It's important to back up all of the files on a Windows computer to an external drive or the cloud before beginning a factory reset.Also, find and save the serial numbers for Office Suite and other software using ProduKey or a similar app. You'll need them to reinstall the applications on your new machine.The process for resetting your PC differs slightly for each version of the operating system. For Windows 10, go to the Start Menu and click on Settings. Then navigate to Update & Security, and find the Recovery menu. Next, select Reset this PC and choose Get Started.
Follow the instructions to revert your computer back to when it was first unboxed.You’ll be asked to choose whether you want to erase data 'quickly' or 'thoroughly.' Opt to erase data thoroughly. It’ll take a little longer, but it makes it more likely that your data is deleted permanently. While there’s no absolute guarantee the data can’t be retrieved after a reset, this simple step increases your security.
New Here?Please keep in mind that we are here to help you build a computer, not to build it for you. There is no need to wipe it seperately, don't know why you're only getting such overcomplicated advice. You can just wipe it while installing Windows.Install it in your machine as normal, leave other HDDs out for the moment just so you don't end up wiping anything you don't intend to.Then install Windows as normal. When you get asked what disk you want to install Windows to, go to to Advanced Options and delete all the partitions currently on the SSD so it's all unused space. Everything is now deleted.Select that unused space, make it into a partition, install Windows to that partition.Edit: as pointed out by below, if the entire drive is going to be used as a System partition you can just directly install to the unallocated space without creating a new partition first. If you're confident enough that you won't accidentally erase the wrong disk you can just start with them all connected, but when I'm not sure of someone's technical ability I advise leaving them unplugged/out just in case. Accidental data loss isn't fun.Someone below says nobody mentioned the boot menu.
They're right, to get this done the first time you won't need to go in there (any more than you normally would to ensure it boots from installation media first). It's all handled by the Windows installer.Depending on what SATA ports your drives are plugged into you might need to sort the drive boot order out once you've plugged everything back in, but that might be redundant in UEFI anyway (it's not an issue for me as my system drive is always plugged into the first SATA port).Edit: Oh yeah, and I generally prefer leaving the power cables unplugged if I need to rather than the SATA ones. Power connectors are chained, SATA aren't, so it's much quicker to get a tidy finish. It depends on what the reason you want to wipe it is.
SSD's are different than regular hard drives. They're limited on the number of writes you can do to them, and they have logic in their hardware to balance the writes behind the scenes, so the standard multiple writes to a sector will kill them fast (and not necessarily get all the memory cells). Magnets are also worthless, since they're solid state.If you just want to clear the data off so you can use the drive for something else, a format will suffice.If you want to securely wipe out data on the SSD so it can't be recovered, for Samsung, look at their SSD tool 'Magician' for the secure erase:The secure erase will send a voltage spike to all the SSD memory cells to reset them in one write operation.