Zeroing out a drive on Windows

Recently I sold a couple more of the hard drives that made up my SnapRAID array back when I had a Linux powered home server. Wanting to check over the drives one last time for SMART info, and bad sectors I noticed I hadn’t wiped the drive, and there were still readable files and partitions there.

Previously, I did this all via a USB3 dock on my Linux laptop using dd, but today we’re on a Windows desktop, so let the adventure commence!

The command we want to run, in an elevated command prompt is:

format g: /fs:NTFS /p:1

In this example, we’re formatting drive G. The /p parameter here is what’s doing the zeroing, indicating the number of passes.

Now to fully clean a drive, after the above you can wipe the partition table from the disk by running:

start > run > cmd
diskpart
list disk
select disk 1
clean

And you’re done.