Wiping Windows 7 Hard Drive: How to Remove Your Data

If you are going to sell, give away, or dispose of your hard drive or computer, it is critical that your data be completely erased from the hard drive so that others cannot recover your private data. Formatting or erasing your hard drive through Windows is not enough.

Wiping your Windows 7 hard drive: here's how

Deleting the data or formatting your hard drive in Windows Explorer will not remove your data thoroughly enough. If you want to completely and irrevocably remove the data on your hard drive, you will need additional software. These programs overwrite the memory of your hard drive several times: recovering the deleted data is then no longer possible. A free program for deleting all data on a hard disk is CCleaner. However, CCleaner only deletes non-partitioned hard drives, so you need to delete the partitions first.To delete your hard drive in Windows 7 with CCleaner

1. Install the software "CCleaner".
2. Start the Windows Control Panel and open Disk Management.
3. Click by right-click on one of the partitions.
4. Select "Delete".
5. Proceed in this way with all partitions until only one drive is left.
6. Start the CCleaner and select the drive to be deleted.
7. Start the deletion process with a click on "Delete".