How do I "clean out" my ssd & hard drive...

Blackink said:

I am going to put a new 500GB SSD in my desktop to replace the 250 GB SSD (I'll use that for storage).
I know how to do a clean install of Windows 10 but I'm not sure what I need to do to the 250GB SSD to wipe everything off from it so that is completely cleaned out.

Can someone point me to the right tutorial here in the forum? I can't find what I'm looking for.

I'd also like to know what I need to do to wipe everything off from a 500GB hard drive (non SSD) and use that on another PC for storage. maybe the same steps?

Thanks,
Steve

Use diskpart "clean all" command.

Clean install
If you're going to do Clean install on the new SSD don't forget to detach all other drives from the MB or you will end with the boot manager in one drive and the OS on the other.

Reset BIOS or load defaults.
Set Disk mode to AHCI, not RAID
Select OS mode = UEFI
Disable fast boot and secure boot (you can turn it on after installation)

Windows can be installed in two ways: Legacy-MBR or UEFI-GPT
To install as Legacy-MBR you must boot the installation drive as Legacy
To install as UEFI-GPT you must boot the installation drive as UEFI.

If you have a UEFI BIOS, you should install as UEFI-GPT
Detach any other drives (SATA or Power cable) from the MB.

During POST, press F12(?) to launch the boot menu. You will see two options for the USB drive. USB UEFI (Name) and USB (Name). Select USB UEFI (Name).
Go to install and delete ALL partitions on the main drive till you have one and only one unallocated space and then proceed.
If you don't want to use MS account, don't enable updates or connect to the internet during installation.


To clean the other drives
If you just format the C: partition you will still have the other system partitions.
As cereberus suggested use diskpart to clean all drive and then create a new one.
Only clean the drive once you have the new SSD working and all data transferred.

Open a CMD window as administrator and type:

diskpart
list disk (it will list all drives. Identify the drive number you want to clean)
select disk n (replace n by the drive number obtained with list disk)
clean
create part primary
select part 1
format fs=ntfs quick
assign
exit (to exit diskpart)

diskpart
list disk (it will list all drives. Identify the drive number you want to clean) shouldn't the drive have a letter instead of a number??

No. It shows disk numbers. Disks do not have letters. Perhaps the unfortunate use of the word "drive" can be confusing.




it can be typed

list disk
or
lis dis

select partition 1
or
sel par 1

diskpart understands either. I normally use the shorter version because it saves a bit of typing.

The word "drive" has at least two meanings. It can mean the mechanism for reading/writing to storage media. Which is why there are floppy disk drives ( into which the storage media is inserted) and cdrom drives (into which the media is inserted ).
I suppose the word "drive" was used because they physically moved the media or the read/write heads.

Drive also means an area capable of holding an operating system - typically a partition.

Nowadays the mechanism and the storage media are usually packaged together. HDD - hard disk and drive. In the case of solid state the "drive" part would be the controller and the storage media are the nand chips.

A drive may have more than one partition.
Letters may be assigned to partitions (some partitions don't have letters assigned to them). Windows assign numbers to drives. Drives (or disks) don't have letters assigned to them.

diskpart (launch diskpart. All the below commands will be diskpart commands)
list disk (it will list all drives. Identify the drive number you want to clean)
select disk n (replace n by the drive number obtained with list disk) All the commands will be to the selected drive .
clean (it will clean the selected drive (disk) resulting on an unallocated space)
create part primary ( As space isn't specified it will create a primary partition the size of the whole unallocated space)
select part 1 (to select the first partition (created above) on the selected drive)
format fs=ntfs quick (to format the partition as ntfs)
assign (to assign a letter to the partition created and formatted above)
exit (to exit diskpart)

Blackink said:

Pentagon:
My 250 GB SSD is getting full. I already have a 500 GB HDD for storage so I'm installing the 500 GB SSD and putting on a clean Windows 10 install on it.

I agree with Pentagon. I have a small SSD (128G) and it has Windows (85G) and Linux (43G) and there is plenty of free drive space on both partitions.
It is always a good idea to have the OS on a drive and Data on another (SSD or HDD). Having OS and Data on separate drive make it simple to make backups or even reinstall Windows without making changes to data.