How To Wipe Out Hard Drive And Reinstall Windows 10

[Malka Sedano]

Howdo I wipe my hard drive clean and reinstall Windows? This question is often asked by a large number of people. Do you want to reinstall Windows 10 without any data loss? This post of MiniTool will provide you with a step-by-step guide and some useful tips.

A lot of users are troubled by many common issues such as system crash, virus attack, blue screen, black screen, faulty hard drive, a slow Windows computer, etc. Under these situations, you may need to reinstall Windows 10.

How do I wipe and reinstall Windows 10? As mentioned above, there are different situations that may need you to reinstall Windows 10. Here you can refer to the following 2 cases to reinstall Windows 10. If your computer just works very slowly but still bootable, you can refer to case 1. If your Windows system fails to boot due to system crash, blue screen and damaged hard drive, please refer to case 2.

Step 3. Then you need to select the Language, Windows Edition, and Architecture versions based on your own choice. Alternatively, you can use the recommended options for this PC. Click on Next to go on.

Step 6. Now, this tool will start downloading Windows 10 and all its available updates to your USB flash drive. Then you need to wait for some time. Once this process succeeds, you will receive a message saying Your USB flash drive is ready. Click on Finish to exit the window.

How do I wipe my hard drive clean and reinstall Windows? I believe that you will reinstall Windows 10 smoothly according to the above full guide. However, the above method will sacrifice all the data on your hard drive.

In this part, we will show you how to wipe a hard drive using MiniTool Partition Wizard. The Wipe Disk feature can help you erase the unwanted data permanently. It is very simple to operate with just a few clicks.

Tip: Since the free edition does not support this function, you need to install the MiniTool Partition Wizard Pro or more advanced edition for the migration. Click here to know more about edition comparison.

Step 4. Select the hard drive connected to your computer and click on Next. Then you will see a warning message saying all the data on the target disk will be destroyed. Click on Yes to confirm this operation.

Recently, my Windows computer works very slowly. I want to perform a clean reinstallation to speed up my computer. How do I wipe my hard drive clean and reinstall Windows? This PC provides a step-by-step guide that helped me reinstall Windows 10 smoothly.Click to Tweet

How do I wipe and reinstall Windows 10? This post walks you through detailed steps based on 2 different cases. In addition, you can utilize MiniTool Partition Wizard to erase hard drive and reinstall Windows 10 with ease.

I've got a set of computers that have had privileged information on that I want to be able to re-use. If I used a Windows boot drive to re-install Windows, how sufficient would that be towards keeping the old data safe?

I'm aware that the only sure way to secure the data is by grinding the hard drives (HDD for my purpose, but for the sake of a more useful reference, if there's any difference for an SSD I'd like to know that too) into a fine powder, but how 'good enough' is it? If it's not good enough, is there an alternative that leaves the hardware intact that is functionally good enough, assuming that incredibly powerful people don't want my data, who'd just break out the pliers and get it anyway.

I don't have any particular threat model - I'm talking about handing over the hardware and never looking at it again, and honestly don't know how to construct a threat model. There would be legal ramifications if the data could be recovered, if that helps address the "how worried are you" kind of question in the comments.

Extra points that I'm interested in, but are tangentially related to the question so aren't required for an answer is; what other issues am I likely to run into if I were to give/sell these computers on? (My organisation owns the computers and the licences for Windows, and would like to offer them to employees once we're done with them). I believe there's an issue with transferring the Windows licence, for example.

As for the Windows licenses, if the license came bundled with the computer, or were bought individually, they can be given to someone else. You can always call Microsoft to confirm the validity of selling a license.

Simply wiping the data (and overwriting it with random junk/zeroes) and installing a new windows is probably safe enough for you. At that point, any recovery of the old data will require the disk to be a HDD, physical access to the disk, really specialized forensic levels of knowledge, and important people caring a great deal about it.

If the data is truly sensitive, I have seen 2TB hard drives for $54-$65 online. You are likely to find cheaper 1tb hdd. If you want to sell them adding approx $60 for another hdd shouldn't be a barrier. Also the person purchasing it gets a new hard drive, possibly increasing it over all appeal.

In most cases, wiping a PC involves simply reformatting the disk and reinstalling Windows using the Reset function. If you are recycling, donating, or selling your PC, the Reset function makes data recovery sufficiently difficult, especially if your data is encrypted (more on that later). This process is straightforward in Windows versions 8, 8.1, 10, and 11, and works for both hard disk drives (HDDs) and solid state drives (SSDs).

If neither of those options are available, you can use third-party software to encrypt your internal SSD. VeraCrypt and AxCrypt are both good options. Just remember to record the encryption passcode somewhere and also the operating system (OS), OS version, and the encryption tool you used so you can recover the files later on if desired.

There are several things you can do to fix minor and major Windows problems. The Check Disk (CHKDSK) utility is great for fixing issues with the file system due to bad sectors on hard drives. We can show you how to fix file system errors in Windows with CHKDSK.

The Windows logo will come back and under it will read Resetting this PC. It will start to count in percentage of completion. This can take several minutes to an hour or more depending on your PC. When it is complete, you can begin your Windows set up again.

Insert your Windows installation media. Navigate to it in File Explorer and open it. Then look for your Windows installation media. Open it and look for the setup application and double-click on it.

Next, the Windows 10 Setup window will open. It reads Install Windows 10 and that it will go online to get updates. If you wanted, you could click on Change how Windows Setup downloads updates. For our purposes, click on the Next button.

It will then start Making sure your PC has enough space, and then arrive at the Ready to install screen. It may say that it will Keep personal files and apps. Just click on Change what to keep under that.

Those are the three ways that you can install Windows in a way that completely wipes out everything on your computer. This is a new start. Just remember, if you wanted to access any of your old files you better have them backed up to a cloud service or on an external hard drive. Enjoy your fresh install of Windows.

Guy has been published online and in print newspapers, nominated for writing awards, and cited in scholarly papers due to his ability to speak tech to anyone, but still prefers analog watches. Read Guy's Full Bio

Welcome to Help Desk Geek- a blog full of tech tips from trusted tech experts. We have thousands of articles and guides to help you troubleshoot any issue. Our articles have been read over 150 million times since we launched in 2008.

I have an old Dell Latitude laptop that I was given by my previous company. It has Safeguard on it, and at boot time it prompts for a password doesn't start Windows. Unfortunately, I can't get the Safeguard password as I have left the company now. I don't need the files on it, I would just like to remove Safeguard, wipe the data, reformat the drive and reinstall Windows XP. I would be grateful for guidance on how to do this.

Assuming that you are running SafeGuard Enterprise, there is a decommissioning tool that you can use to wipe out the encrypted keystore, thus rendering the encrypted drive unreadable. For more info, check out this KBA:

Otherwise, from my experience, if you just delete the master boot record on the internal drive, you can reformat the OS without any problems (although, this is not as secure as using the decommissioning tool). To delete the MBR, you can either boot from a Windows PE disk/UFD, start diskpart, select your disk and run the command "clean". If you're more familiar with Linux, grab a Linux live CD (like Ubuntu) and from the command line, run the command "dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=512 count=1", assuming that your internal drive is sda. This will delete the MBR and partition table, and your setup CDs should be able to recreate the partition table from this.

Finally, you could probably just get away with reinstalling Windows XP right on top of the current encrypted drive (just tell Windows to format the partition). The only caveat is that you might need to delete the MBR if Windows doesn't do it automatically during setup.

Editor's note: many of the answers are about removing Ubuntu from dual-boot but keeping Windows (which is a bit complicated), while other answers are about removing Ubuntu from single-boot (which is easy: basically just format the disk while installing Windows). The question as written is ambiguous between dual-boot or single-boot.

3a8082e126