How to Wipe An External Hard Drive on Windows 11

Need to wipe an external hard drive on Windows 11

External hard drive, also known as the removable hard drive. Because of its large capacity and convenience of operation, it is widely used to save documents, images, music, videos and other personal files.

When you plan to discard or sell your external hard drive, to keep the data from being leaked, you may want to delete all the data on it. However, after the data is deleted or formatted, a copy of this data still exists on the drive. The users just cannot find it from the original location, if their paths are not overwritten by new data, the deleted data can be recovered by software.

Therefore, you need to know how to wipe the external hard drive on Windows 11 thoroughly to meet your different needs.

Wiping an external hard drive on Windows 11 with Diskpart

Diskpart is a powerful built-in utility, it has many functions including creating partitions, deleting partitions, merging (extending) partitions, etc. You can also wipe an external hard drive by cleaning all the data on it. The detailed steps are as follows:

Before you do: Please double-check whether the entered command is correct, because the wrong commands will cause accidental loss of data.

Step 1. Press "Windows"  and type "cmd". Then click "Run as Administrator".

Step 2. Input "diskpart" in the window ejected and press "Enter".

Step 3. Input and run the following commands and hit "Enter":

۰ list disk (list all disks on your computer.)
۰ select disk 2 (Select the disk you want to wipe completely.)
۰ clean all (Delete all data from the selected disk.)

Step 4. Type "Exit" and press "Enter" to close the Diskpart.

How to erase an external hard drive on Windows 11 with Disk Management

Disk Management is another Windows utility, you can use it to add mirror, create volumes and mark partitions as active. Compared with Diskpart, Disk Management seems to be  much easier. Here's detailed guidance:

Warning:
✍ If your hard drive becomes RAW, the Format button will be grayed out because the file may be corrupted.
✍ You can’t format a partition over 32GB into FAT32.
✍ If the hard drive is write-protected, you also cannot format it.

Step 1. Press "Windows+X" together to open the menu, and then choose "Disk Management".

Step 2. Right-click the target hard drive and click "Format".

Step 3. If you want to wipe the partition deeply, don't select "Perform a quick format" and click "OK".

Step 4. Close the Disk Management after you complete this operation.

Using freeware to wipe an external hard drive on Windows 11  

Generally, the above methods can successfully wipe your external hard drive. However, for reasons like the target external drive is a RAW file system or the file system is write-protected, sometimes you may fail to completely wipe the external hard drive.

To avoid these troubles, you can try AOMEI Partition Assistant Standard. In an intuitive interface, this freeware not only makes it easy for every user to perform disk wipe operations, but also has powerful features such as Format partition, Delete partition, and Convert File System between FAT32 and NTFS.

Here’ re the steps on how to wipe an external hard drive on Windows 11.

Warnings:
✐ Please backup the important data you need before your operation, because cannot retrieve it after wiping the external hard drive.
✐ Due to the different storage methods of HDD and SSD, Wipe Hard Drive feature cause serious damage to the SSD. So if you want to safely wipe SSD on Windows 11, you can try the SSD Secure Erase function.

Step 1. Connect your external hard drive to Windows 11 and be sure it can be detected. Install and open AOMEI Partition Assistant Standard. Right-click the external hard drive and select "Wipe Disk".

Step 2. Choose a wiping method in the ejected windows, and press "OK".

Step 3. Click "Apply" and "Proceed" to complete the pending operations.

Note: You can also select three other options in "Wipe Hard Drive" including Fill sectors with random data (Safe, Quick), DoD 5220.22-M (Very Safe, Slow) and Gutmann (35 passes, Very Safe, Very Slow) if you upgrade it to the professional version.

Further tip: Formatting an external hard drive

If your purpose is not to sell or throw away your old external hard drive, but to clean up all data on the hard drive and reuse it, you can also use this freeware to format your external hard drive hard disk.

Step 1. Right-click the partitions on the external hard drive you want to format, choose "Format Partition".

Step 2. Set the file system of the partition and add Partition Label if you want.

Step 3. Review the effect of the operation and click "Apply" to perform it.

Summary

I believe that as long as you read the methods mentioned above carefully, you should be able to easily solve the problem of how to wipe an external hard drive on Windows 11. By the way, if you want to recover lost partitions on external hard drives, please turn to AOMEI Partition Assistant Pro.