How to Use the Best Portable Disk Wipe Utility to Wipe a Hard Disk?

How can I wipe a hard drive on Windows?

Help! Recently, I want to sell my computer because it’s become really old. But first, I wanna wipe the external hard drive. So, followed some tutorial on the internet: I booted from my installation disc and entered Command Prompt. I was prompted with the error "Virtual disk service error clean is not allowed" on the disk containing the current boot, system, pagefile, crashdump, or hibernation volume”. Can anyone help me fix this error?

Why wipe a hard drive?

When our PC got old, many problems could occur – the speed could become slow and there might be frequent system crashes. Then, you decide to sell the computer or abandon it. But first, you should clear all the data on the internal hard drive for data security. In this case, many users choose to format hard drives. Yes, it seems that formatting helps erase all data on a hard drive but what you don’t know is that it’s not complete – other people can still recover the data with some specialized data recovery software. So, now, it’s the time to wipe a hard drive with some third-party disk wipe utility.

What is the best portable disk wipe utility?

There are many disk erasers on market and if you still have no idea which one to choose, this time, I recommend AOMEI Partition Assistant Technician which is a powerful portable disk wipe utility, convenient for engineers to do IT maintenance or support on client computers. With this software, you can create a USB disk wipe tool and insert it into any computer where you want to wipe a hard disk. Then, it only takes several steps to get it done.

How to wipe an HDD with the portable disk wipe software?

The following contents is divided into 2 parts. Part 1 explains how to create a USB disk wipe tool while in Part 2, I’ll introduce how to securely wipe an HDD with this tool.

Beforehand, download the demo of the portable disk wipe utility.

Part 1 Create a USB disk wipe tool

Step 1. Install and launch AOMEI Partition Assistant Technician and click on “Tools” on the upper right of the main interface, Then, hit “Create Portable Version”.

Step 2. Hit “Next” to proceed.

Step 3. Tick the option “Use USB Device” and select the device in the dropdown menu. Then, hit "Create".

Step 4. Hit “Create” to begin the creation of portable version.

Part 2. Wipe a hard drive

Step 1. Insert the USB disk wipe tool into the computer where you want to wipe a hard drive, launch AOMEI Partition Assistant from the USB, right-click on the internal hard drive and select “Wipe Hard Drive”.

Step 2.  Check “Fill sectors with Zero” and hit “OK”.

Step 3. After returning to the main interface, hit “Apply” where the screenshot shows to execute the disk wiping operation.

What if it’s an SSD?

An SSD uses a different way for data storage and if you use the same way to wipe the HDD to wipe the SDD, the SSD’ lifespan could be affected. In this case, another feature of AOMEI Partition Assistant – SSD Secure Erase – is recommended.

Just launch the software, click on the SSD, and choose "Wipe" > “SSD Secure Erase” and follow the instructions to finish the rest steps.

Conclusion

Wiping the hard drive is a necessary step before selling or renting your computer to others. In this tutorial, an impressive third-party portable disk wipe utility designed for engineers is introduced to help. Meanwhile, this utility provides “Wipe Hard Drive” and “SSD Secure Erase” for HDD and SSD because these 2 require different disk wiping methods. More than disk wiping, other features like file shredding and disk clone are also supported by this software.