Disk Wipe

When you select a physical device, the Wipe command processes all logical drives consecutively, erasing the only data in unoccupied areas (free clusters and system areas), leaving existing data intact. Unallocated space (where no partition exists) has been erased as well.

Note: If you want to erase all data (existing and deleted) from the hard drive device permanently, see Disk Erase.

If KillDisk detects that a partition has been damaged or that it is not safe to proceed, KillDisk does not wipe data in that area. The reason it does not proceed is that a damaged partition might contain important data.

There are some cases where partitions on a device cannot be wiped. Some examples are an unknown or unsupported file system, a system volume, or an application start up drive. In these cases the Wipe button is disabled. If you select a device and the Wipe button is disabled, select individual partitions (drives) and wipe them separately.

Switch to Local Devices view
Select the device or a volume to wipe in the disk explorer view. You may select multiple devices/volumes to be wiped out simultaneously
Click the Wipe toolbar button to wipe out all data in unoccupied sectors on the disk or one of its' partitions. Alternatively you can execute Wipe command from Actions menu, or use the context menu

Figure: Initiating the Wipe operation
Confirm Wipe options
Use tabbed views to adjust disk wipe options if necessary. Available options:
Figure: Selecting an an erase algorithm for the wipe
Select the areas of the disks to be wiped. With individual disks you may select individual partitions.
Click Start to advance to the final step before erasing data. The progress of the wiping procedure will be monitored in the Disk Wiping screen.
To stop the process for any reason, click the stop button for a particular disk. Click the stop all button to cancel wiping for all selected disks. Note that all existing applications and data will not be touched. Data that has been wiped from unoccupied sectors is not recoverable.
Optional: Select the wiped partition click File Browser toolbar button to inspect the work that has been done.
KillDisk scans the system records or the root records of the partition. The Browser tab appears. Existing file names and folder names appear with a multi-colored icon and deleted file names and folder names appear with a gray-colored icon. If the wiping process completed correctly, the data residue in these deleted file clusters and the place these files hold in the directory records or system records has been removed. You should not see any grey-colored file names or folder names in the wiped partition.

You will see a confirmation dialog when the process is complete, where you may and print an Erase Certificates

Note: If there are any errors, for example due to bad clusters, they will be reported on the Interactive screen and in the Log. If such a message appears, you may cancel the operation or continue wiping data.