Find the drive you want to wipe, and note the drive's device path. This will list all the storage drives currently connected to your machine. Open up a command line terminal and enter ' sudo fdisk -l'. If you've got a Linux-based machine, wiping any of the hard drives - internal or external - is a slightly fiddly process that involves using the command line. It might take a few hours to complete the process but is a very secure way of doing so. This will write the data to the disk several times. Search for the Erase tab security options and click 7-pass Erase. Although the legacy OS is now obsolete, you might still encounter older devices with the OS still installed. Wiping a laptop running Windows 7 shouldn't be too difficult. Windows 10 has both features and adds the ability to backup and restore system images. You can use the Windows Backup feature in Windows 7 of File History in Windows 8. To backup, you can simply connect an external drive to the laptop and drag files and folders to it.

Once you have connected the external drive to the laptop you want to wipe, you can check that it is big enough to store all the data you need.

If everything is stored on one drive (usually the C: drive in Windows, right-click on the drive icon to see how much data is taking up space there. You will need to figure out how much storage you need. The most complete and quickest way, however, is to back up to an external hard drive that's directly connected to the laptop.

If you are backing up files selectively, or there aren't many of them and you have a fairly good internet connection, then backing up to the cloud is an option. There are a few ways of doing this and the most practical for you will depend on how much data you need to copy.

How to wipe a computer windows 10