How to Completely Wipe a Hard Drive or SSD

How do i bypass "clean is not allowed on the disk containing the current boot, system, filepage" etc. im trying to get rid of linux

Thank u so much!! But dang an hour or more💀 im doing this on a old hdd i think ill be here for a while😭

UMMM... im following the steps wiping 2 tb HD. and he decides to mention it takes hours after i start the wipe process!!!!! I guess its my fault for being impatient lol.

Lots of luck with sandisk external ssd mine mysteriously refused to respond to my password and after a number of attempts then decided to lose the password hint as well and steadfastly refused all attempts including cmd prompt diskpart commands etc such as attrib to change from readonly to allow acess and even the clean command refused to work.

Glary utilities that usually works would do nothing so I spent $120.00 on a full professional unlocked decent disk utility for windows and that would not work, Because I also run OS2 and Arcaos I have a legit unrestricted copy of Dfsee that even allows low level formatting and all other disk operations and pretty much does anything including on the fly change from MBR to GPT and it failed.

Sandisk security software and what Western Digital supply as they now own Sandisk also was the first port of call and failed as well.

Online research finds many people have issues with this security software on these products and the manufacturers forum are a bad joke where legitimate concerns had me labeled as unproductive in the discussion, Well I will give them unproductive as I now have an external SSD that cost hundreds of Dollars and is a boat anchor for a model ship.
So my experience and if you search knowing what questions to ask now you will see why I highly recommend stay away far away from these products and others will back my sentiments

if we want to wipe the c drive. Will Window also get wiped ?

Thank you!

I cleaned my 2 gigabytes HDD how long it will take?

My disk doesn't work its been 5 days

isn't this going to crash my laptop because the system 32 is in C?

why I cant enter the diskpart

Excelent!

CHAAA GYA SHEHZADAAAA

wish i found this vid 1st out of the other 10 i watched

you are the best <3 this means love xd

Thanks for this. Your method was very easy, but I always hear about DBAN when looking up how to wipe drives. Is DBAN the same thing? Is it more "secure" than your method? Would there be any issues if I use both? Thanks again 🙂

Thanks for the good tutorial.
Just one question: Is there a way to stop the process?
I did it with a 4 TB external HDD and it took forever. I let the PC on over night, but when I checked on it in the morning, I found that Windows had done a automatic update and had restarted the PC. I wasn't sure whether the wiping process had finished before the restart or not, so I started it again, to make sure, even though Diskpart tells me "Size 4657 GB / free 4657 GB".
I guess that means it is wiped, but as I said, I wanted to make sure and started a second wipe, but now I regret the decision and would rather reset the drive.
Can the wiping process be interrupted without causing issues?

I got a error message... (Translated from German by myself, so the English original will probably be different.):
"Error in Diskpart: The task couldn't be executed because of a E/A device error."

Thank you! This was very helpful

is this method good for clean up SSD which I dismantle from another noteboock computer. I have mounted this SSD to Transcend case with USB 3.1. tks

when i type clean all it just says access is denied ...

Thank you so much man, this was incredibly helpful.

Thanks, I needed to wipe a split drive with faulty windows partions I couldn't remove and combine through the GUI. My dumb brother cloned a 128GB drive with a dead Win 10 install on a 1TB NVMe and just the command "clean" in diskpart was enough to make it a proper drive again.

hi men i need help i started the clean and i have mistankedli closed the window so i started the proces agin it finished but started agan and i cant continue becouse my pc is telling me that the hdd is still geting cleaned and it shows that it is full wiped pls help

It says clean not allowed on the disk containing current boot

Does this work if windows was corrupted on the ssd u want to wipe

Is there any way can erase data of SSD having boot. I only have single SSD which i want to Erase

Thank you so much you actually deserve a like ❤️

where do you have that wallpaper from?

Is there a way to check the progress as this is happening when you are wiping the drive?

i closed the command prompt after i clicked enter because i thought it wasnt running should i still wait or run the prompt again

2024 and still works. Thanks for your tutorial!

awesome sauce

hi! i need urgent help,
tldr i did the driver cloning stuff from hdd to ssd, switch my boot drive from hdd to ssd and after doing all of that, did the drive clean up you did in the command prompt... but for some reason after 1 hour (give or take) my pc suddenly turned off, but the weird part is, my mouse, keyboard and pc still has some light on, in the pc theres this blue blinking part near the reboot button but thats it

Year 2025. Amazing how a literal 4 year video can help someone. Thanks a bunch🙏

It really takes a long time but it works

Do any of these methods harm the lifespan of an SSD in any way?
And are the files recoverable with third-party tools?

how do i know if the cleanup process is occuring after entering clean all

Guys how do i fix this when it was cleaning i go to the diskmanagement and saw it all erased while its still processing i alt f4 while it was cleaning and it says that it cannot be convert to gpt cause its still cleaning how bro will i run it again

How do you know it’s cleaning the drive? Any way to check while it’s working?

thank you!!! this helped so much... your a rockstar

GUYS if you have an SSD, don't use clean all. Instead, just use clean. This is because clean all puts zeros in every sector, including the ones that are already zero or empty. This is meant for hard drives because empty sectors on hard drives can have remnants of previous data.

"Clean is now allowed on the disk containing curent boot, system, pagefile, crashdump or hibernation volume"

I wiped my hard drive and now it’s gone off the system i wanted to get rid of everything on it but now i can’t use it how do i fix that

what do you do when booth drives are the same size how do i know witch drive is the secondary drive i want to wipe???

i cant clean it cuz there is boot, system etc.

do i have to wait it say successful ? or it just done even it doesn't say anything? or it still running... how long for 1tb ssd to finish?... i just want to know... can you help?

Is there a way to find which hard drive I am using?

This was a good guide and it worked perfectly, simple & easy. Thanks!

(Nothing about the guide)
When you said it could take 1h per 320GB I was shocked and had second thoughts about really waiting out it but it took like 5 seconds for me.