
This is one of the most common reasons why you need to erase data on the hard drive, it’s to ensure no privacy leakage.
#Free hard drive formatting tool windows 7
My question is the following:ĭoes this also apply to Windows 7? The above article from Microsoft does not specify Windows 7 under "Applies to", although Windows 7 is (to the best of my knowledge) a later version? I need to write zeros to hard drive in Windows 7 and ensure all personal files are securely erased before selling out or donating to others.Īccording to this article from Microsoft, zeros are written to an entire disk when it is formatted (not using the quick format option) in Windows Vista and newer versions of Windows, but it does not mention Windows 7. Windows 7: does formatting a disk actually write zeros to it? Searching online, you may find that many users want to zero fill a hard drive, the following is a user case from superuser forum.

The write zeros method is also called single overwrite, zero-fill erase or zero-fill.
#Free hard drive formatting tool how to
Then, how to write zeros to hard drive in Windows 7/8/10/11? You need to remove the binary data by overwriting the zeros and ones with new data, here use a zero value to replace original and readable data on the disk, thus preventing most hardware-based and all software-based recovery methods from extracting information from the disk. And this is how the computer knows where the data is stored. The magnetic polarities has two sides, also called binary data, one is 0 and the other is 1. The hard drive stores the data on the surface of magnetic and rotating platters (located in the hard disk case) and it reads data by the magnetic polarities on the platter.

What does write zeros to hard drive mean?īefore saying the meaning of writing zeros to hard drive, you may need to see how the hard drive stores and reads files, which makes your better understand the write zero method.

