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I am looking for a free utility that I can run from a USB that will wipe a drive that is on a Windows 11 machine. On my machine Windows 11 is corrupted and the repair utilities do not work (they crash) hence the innate Windows 11 wipe user data crashes also. What I want is something like DiskWipe that I can simply download to a USB and then use the Windows 11 recovery options launch a command prompt and navigate to the USB and launch the program. Sadly DiskWipe does not support Windows 11 (I tried it already).
I spent a lot of time searching on the Internet and most things I come across want me to burn an ISO image and boot from the USB. The beauty of DiskWipe was it was a small executable download. But as stated, it has not been updated to support Windows 10 and 11. I am looking for a similar solution. I.E. download a executable to a USB and launch the .exe on the USB from the command prompt.
The object is to clean my personal data before returning the laptop to work.
I am looking for a free utility that I can run from a USB that will wipe a drive that is on a Windows 11 machine. On my machine Windows 11 is corrupted and the repair utilities do not work (they crash) hence the innate Windows 11 wipe user data crashes also. What I want is something like DiskWipe that I can simply download to a USB and then use the Windows 11 recovery options launch a command prompt and navigate to the USB and launch the program. Sadly DiskWipe does not support Windows 11 (I tried it already).
I spent a lot of time searching on the Internet and most things I come across want me to burn an ISO image and boot from the USB. The beauty of DiskWipe was it was a small executable download. But as stated, it has not been updated to support Windows 10 and 11. I am looking for a similar solution. I.E. download a executable to a USB and launch the .exe on the USB from the command prompt.
The object is to clean my personal data before returning the laptop to work.
Thank you.
If your intention is to wipe the boot disk of your work laptop, you're going to need something that will either run and reboot the PC, or you're going to have to boot from a USB stick to wipe it. Many Windows apps won't let you wipe your boot disk.
That said - unless your IT group has explicitly given you permission to wipe your work laptop - I wouldn't do it. It's likely to get you into trouble. I'd just drop the personal files in the recycle bin and empty it - no one is going to go digging around to restore that.
Unless you're under a legal hold of some sort, of course - in which case, it won't matter. Your data has probably already been backed up somewhere.
That said - unless your IT group has explicitly given you permission to wipe your work laptop - I wouldn't do it.
This. If you turned in a laptop to me that you decided to wipe would make me very suspicious about why. Delete your stuff and turn it the way it is. 99% of IT People, unless you are being fired for something sketchy, are just going to wipe it without looking, throw it on the pile and give it to the next guy.
I literally saw the "company laptop" part after I posted and was leaving for work so didn't have time to re-edit but I do agree with what the other two said:
Do NOT do anything funky to a company machine! There is a chance they may not even notice but just don't do any disk wiping.
I'd recommend this:
- Uninstall any programs you personally installed (use Revo Uninstaller, if needed then remove Revo as well or run it from a flash drive)
- Clear the entire cache of your browser(s) completely
- MOVE your personal files that the company couldn't claim any intellectual property rights on.
The reason I say MOVE and not DELETE is because, deleting does NOT 100% delete all traces. Neither does moving however moving will 100% remove the file itself cannot be viewed or recovered.
When I ran the laptop support group for a major (at the time) software company. I could care less what personal info you had on your machine. When you left (assuming you weren't being let go for legal reasons in which case the first idea you would have that you were exiting is when your VP and I walked up to you and asked for the machine, and your access to the server would already be locked) I would ask you if there was anything you wanted off the machine or the servers. I would then reformat the disk (you would be welcome to stand there and watch me start it if you liked) We used to joke that if you had compromising pictures of the president of the company we would like to know so we could use them to protect our budget requests (even the President knew we joked about that) but other than that we didn't care.
But come in with a disk that had been wiped --- That made us suspicious and we would start digging into the automatic backups to the servers and see what we could find. Only someone guilty of something would go to that trouble.
My favorite way of wiping my or friends machines that they want to make sure are clean before getting rid of them is to use a USB based copy of Linux Mint and load the machine with a basic copy of Mint (doesn't matter which edition or version) It will reformat the disk with a different type of file system and scribble OS and executable files all over it. Maybe some professionals could recover some of your underlying stuff but I doubt they would get enough to do anything with. But a company machine - Nope, don't do it without permission.
- Uninstall any programs you personally installed (use Revo Uninstaller, if needed then remove Revo as well or run it from a flash drive)
- Clear the entire cache of your browser(s) completely
- MOVE your personal files that the company couldn't claim any intellectual property rights on.
The reason I say MOVE and not DELETE is because, deleting does NOT 100% delete all traces. Neither does moving however moving will 100% remove the file itself cannot be viewed or recovered.
Moving the file doesn't necessarily wipe the original - most times it just marks the sector available. Can still be recovered by anyone who knows what they're doing. The only foolproof way to make your data inaccessible is to overwrite the disk. Like before - don't do that on a company machine, you're going to get in trouble. If your company is using O365, your profile folders may be synced with OneDrive for Business, so even if you delete your data, it's probably sitting somewhere else too.
Any corporation worth their salt is managing their computers - 2 out of 3 of those methods you mentioned are blocked on our machines. Removing apps usually needs admin rights and that's not happening, and we block moving any kind of data to anything external - USB, OneDrive, that sort. If you login to our OD from a non-company machine, you can't download, print or otherwise move data either. We don't allow other cloud apps as well.
Plug a USB stick into one of our PC's, you're going to get flagged. Try to copy files and you get flagged again. You can read a file, but not execute anything. Many companies are starting to do this, even smaller ones, to a lesser extent of course.
Data theft, and data privacy, is a huge concern. People think that their personal data on a work machine belongs to them, no it does not - it belongs to the company that issued you the laptop. It blows my mind that there are still people who only have one computer - their company issued one. That is a terrible, stupid idea. If you get let go, you are going to lose that data, I've seen it happen many times. I worked with someone who went through the hoops to get approval to move her personal data off her PC to a USB stick when she left the company. Got the approval, helped her move everything. Couple months later she lost the stick, didn't have a backup and begged us to recover her data. Denied. We already wiped the machine and the backup had already been deleted as well. She lost some very, very important data because she was stupid.
Last edited by ReblTeen84; 02-02-2023 at 09:52 AM..
Moving the file doesn't necessarily wipe the original - most times it just marks the sector available. Can still be recovered by anyone who knows what they're doing. The only foolproof way to make your data inaccessible is to overwrite the disk.
Outside drive overwrite which is not an ideal thing for OP, moving is the best option.
Not sure what your personal experience was on this but I actually tried it on 2 different occasions, after rebooting, R-Studio couldn't even locate the file in its original name/location.
At best, a very remote chance, it might have a copy as a "lost file" but no one is going to go through bunch of scattered files with garbled names searching for something unless they know exactly what they are looking for and have time to waste opening and examining each one provided the file integrity is 100%.
Imho, it is not an issue for this situation.
If I was OP, I'd be more worried and also focused on the other 2 areas I mentioned.
i was gonna' suggest testdisk-live but it wont run .exe files.
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