SDelete VS Darik's Boot and Nuke

What lessons can we take away from my story? They are, in fact, quite simple and obvious: merely deleting files and quick formatting is usually not enough when disposing of or selling hard drives. For more assurance, it’s better to perform a full format (in modern operating systems, of course). And for the truly paranoid, there’s the good old console utility SDelete from the Sysinternals suite or a tool named... - Source: dev.to / 5 months ago

I assume you were using a dynamically expanding disk - if so just note it won't dynamically contract just by deleting files. To shrink the drive you will likely need to run sdelete -z on the drive inside the VM to clear the free space, then edit and compact the VHDX. You will need to be able to boot the VM to run sdelete though so you'll need to temporarily move other files off the drive, or move the VM files to... Source: 10 months ago

You can always download sdelete https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/sdelete and do an overwrite pass just to be safe. It'll take a while but you can do other things while it's running. Source: 11 months ago

My understanding is that it doesn't completely solve it. I don't have time to dig up an authoritative source for this claim — hopefully this superuser comment will suffice. I believe that you can achieve something close to a secure erase by filling up your SSD to 100% capacity with data before deleting; the utility sdelete supposedly does this when using the -c option. Source: about 1 year ago

Check out sdelete from the MS sysinternals utilities suite: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/sdelete. Source: about 1 year ago

If you’re worried about such people try deriks boot and nuke Https://dban.org. Source: 10 months ago

Presuming you want to sell it with windows running, first make a Window boot disk so you can recover. Then use DBAN (https://dban.org/) to completely wipe the drive. Then reinstall Windows up to the setup stage. The new owner will experience it as a new computer. Source: 10 months ago

An alternative to Parted is DBAN Darik's Boot and Nuke We use this for most full Drive wipes Https://dban.org/. Source: 10 months ago

I do love all the creative ways to completely destroy a drive, but in general you should just be able to use DBAN if you just want to wipe the drive to make data recovery near impossible, but still be able to use it afterwards. Source: 10 months ago

You have a few options. The easiest in my opinion is just to smash the hard drives (assuming you don't want to reuse or sell them). Otherwise I use DBAN for permanently wiping HDDs: https://dban.org/ Try using your motherboard's UEFI BIOS for SSD or maybe even the manufacturer's utility if you have one. Source: 11 months ago