How to securely wipe the Windows system drive.
Hi, everyone. Leo, Notenboom, here for
Askleo.com. It's actually a common problem.
One of the things you want to make sure of when you donate a used computer,
get rid of an old computer, or just sell or give an old computer
that you've been using for some time to someone else.
You want to make sure you're not giving away more than you intend.
You want to make sure that your data is not just gone, but not recoverable.
There are a couple of different approaches
that we've taken in the past for random disks, and I'll go through those.
The system disk, as it turns out, has its own interesting problem because
some of the things we normally do to it, we can't do while we're running Windows.
However, Windows also provides us a way to do pretty much exactly what we want.
Let's have a quick look.
So here I am in Windows 11.
I have, of course, a C drive here that is my system drive.
It's got the usual things on it.
Presumably, it has my documents.
Let's assume for a moment that it has sensitive data.
Now, of course, the traditional approach
to dealing with a disk that you're getting rid of is to format it.
Do something that is not a quick format,
but a full format, so that the entire disk is being physically written to and erased.
The problem, of course,
is you can't do that while you're running windows from that drive.
Now, one approach, of course, is to take the drive out of the machine,
take it to a different machine, or maybe put it into an external USB
enclosure, and use a different machine to format the drive.
That's actually fine.
That works well.
But I'm going to give you two additional
approaches that theory work just as well and don't require pulling the drive out.
The very first one is going to sound a little funny.
So what I have here, of course,
is my local disk C, I'm going to enable BitLocker.
So what I'm going to do is save it to a file because I have to.
I'm going to throw this onto a different drive.
So now, the BitLocker setup is actually
satisfied and will allow me to continue with setting up BitLocker.
I'm going to go ahead and run this.
This is the important part of this equation.
There are two choices here.
You can encrypt only the disk space
that is currently being used or you can encrypt the entire drive.
I recommend that you encrypt the entire drive because what this will do is also
encrypt the free space, the free space that would normally
potentially have things that could be recoverable.
I'm going to go ahead and kick this off.
Start encrypting.
Now, of course, this takes a little while.
How long it takes will vary depending
on the size of your hard disk and the speed of your system.
That's fine.
It takes however long it takes, and in a few minutes after I'm done
talking, we'll just fast forward through this process.
But the concept is very simple.
Encrypting your disk prevents people
from accessing its contents, which sounds like exactly what you want to have happen.
The encrypted disk to someone who cannot sign in as you
is nothing more than a disk full of garbage, a disk full of random data.
They can't see what's on there.
And by encrypting absolutely everything, absolutely everything is unviewable.
The catch, the only catch, and the only reason that in extreme cases
you might want to avoid this is that the disk is still accessible
to your account, in this case, the account that I've used to encrypt this disk.
So if at any point in the future,
someone can sign into the machine using my account,
then in theory, they would be able to see the data even though it's been encrypted.
However, as long as you keep your account secure, and like you saw,
we throw away the recovery key, this is actually a pretty decent approach
to making sure that that data will never, ever be seen again.
However,
there's another approach, and this one too, is a little bit non-int, intuitive.
I'm going to close this,
and what we're going to do is go to the settings program and search for reset.
We're going to reset this PC.
We're going to remove everything.
A local reinstall will be fine.
This is the important step: change settings.
We'll click on that.
Clean data?
That's what we want to have happen.
Clean the drive.
This may take hours, but will make it harder to recover files.
We'll hit confirm and hit next.
Now, getting things ready, this won't take long.
On the other hand, you'll notice that this will take a while
because it is going to overwrite all of the data on the drive.
We'll click on reset and off it goes.
That is the second approach you can use
to resetting and protecting all of the information on your hard drive.
This process will not only erase
everything of yours, but it'll actually reinstall Windows.
That is the way to transfer Windows to the person you're giving the machine to.
It's a fresh copy of Windows for them to set up however they want to use it.
And with Windows 10 and 11,
the digital license key means that, well, Windows is basically licensed
not necessarily to you, but to the specific machine.
And that means Windows travels with the machine, whoever you give it to.
This obviously is going to take quite some
time, and I'm not going to run through the whole thing.
But the bottom line here is that either
of these two techniques: using BitLocker and then throwing away
the key, or resetting your PC and making sure
to clean the drive are great ways to ensure when you give your PC away,
you're not giving away more than you think.
I hope that helps.
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Askleo.com/166750.
I'm Leo Notenboom, and this is Askleo.com.
Thanks for watching.