How to Zero-Fill a Hard Drive With the Format Command
Since you can write zeros to a hard drive with the format command both from within Windows 7 and Windows Vista and from outside the operating system, we’ve created two ways to proceed through these instructions. This process could take several minutes to several hours. With all the data replaced by zeros, there’s no longer any information to be found on your hard drive by a file recovery program. If you don’t already have or can’t find a way to create it, then you won’t be able to write zeros to a drive in this way. See our Free Data Destruction Software Programs list for more options. The format command used in this way will format the E drive with the NTFS file system and write zeros to every sector of the drive twice. If you’re formatting a different drive, change e to whatever drive letter you need. It doesn’t matter what OS is on the computer. If you don’t know the volume label, cancel the format using Ctrl+C and then see How to Find the Volume Label of a Drive From the Command Prompt. If the drive you’re formatting happens to be very large and/or you’ve chosen to make several write-zero passes, don’t worry if the percent completed doesn’t even reach 1 percent for several seconds or even several minutes.
