Hello! I just downloaded a bootable windows onto an usb stick and I from there booted up the computer from the USB stick and formatted all the disks inside the laptop. Then exitted the program. Now when I boot up the computer it just says "No operating System Installed"
My question is, is everything wiped from the disk? and unable to retrieve the data on there? It's important since I am getting rid of the laptop.
Some computer manufacturers have a lot of government sales.
When disposing of a drive they must meet certain security levels.
These computer manufacturers provide tools in the BIOS to clean drives to meet the government criteria.
There is one tool for HD and another for SSD.
These are disk sanitizer and secure erase respectively.
Tools may allow specified number of writes (0 and 1) to the drive.
The more the number of writes the more secure the drive for sale or disposal.
These BIOS options are available on many HP computers.
The "My Computer" section displayed only PCDesktop.
So check the BIOS to see if there is any firmware available to sanitize or clean the drive.
If not you can search google for similar software.
Also see: Remove everything in this link:
Reset Windows 10 | Tutorials
For the slightly less paranoid, boot the install USB to the Command Prompt and use DISKPART's CLEAN ALL command.
Erase Disk using Diskpart Clean Command in Windows 10 | Tutorials... each and every sector on the disk is zeroed (secure erase), which completely deletes all data contained on the disk. This will make the data on the disk unrecoverable. It will take about an hour per 320 GB to finish running the "clean all" command on a disk.
That's fine for an HDD, but not recommended (by Dr. Philip Yip, at least) for an SSD.
Use of DiskPart to Clean the HDD/SSD - Windows 10 Installation Guides... CLEAN ALL is not recommended for a SSD as data is continuously remapped across the SSD Drives surface and a cleaning algorithm like this doesn’t work correctly and may reduce the SSDs lifecycle.
There's information on sanitising SSDs here, from Kingston.
SSD Data Wiping: Sanitize or Secure Erase SSDs?
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