messing around on my Desktop PC

thebullsback

advice please .I have a desktop with a 2 SSD drives and I would like to wipe them both clean before I reinstall windows 11
I have been lent a copy of Aomei partition assistant which has a wipe disk function on it .
Am I right in assuming that after using this software to wipe both SSDs clean I simply plug a USB Flash Drive in that has Win 11 installation media file on and this will install the OS ?
Obviously I have nothing on the PC that needs keeping so there no need to back anything up I assume?
Thank You for Reading.  

mluton

You can remove the data from the SSDs on a fresh install of Windows 11, Just click delete on all entries till it leaves 2 drives

PRAISETHESUN

If you're going to retain the drives to use in your own machine I don't see the need for anything more than doing a quick format in Windows? The drives can be formatted during the Windows installation process.

The install process is usually pretty straightforward. My experience is you create the installation USB by downloading the required software from the Microsoft website. From there restart the PC with the USB inserted. You might need to change the boot drive in the bios to manually select your USB boot drive if it doesn't recognize it straight away.

Frozen_up_north

Just a point to note, unlike the spinning disc variety, it is very difficult to securely erase SSD drives as they use a wear levelling technique that evens out the areas written to.

Obviously not an issue if you are reusing the drive(s) yourself, but for disposal it is recommended that you physically destroy the drive. 

Vitor

No love for Linux Mint then? 

prowla

As per above, you can deconfigure the disk partitions during the Windows installation.

That should suffice for reinstalling for your own use there's no particular need to do a secure erase unless you have anything on there you want to absolutely get rid of.

An alternative way to erase a disk is to boot from an interactive install media (eg. Linux Mint), delete files from the disk, rip a DVD to an ISO image, repeatedly copy that file to the disk (do a script to copy to bigfile-0001, bigfile-0002, ...) until it fills up; at the end anything on the disk will be overwritten,

Newcad

Frozen_up_north said:

Just a point to note, unlike the spinning disc variety, it is very difficult to securely erase SSD drives as they use a wear levelling technique that evens out the areas written to.

Obviously not an issue if you are reusing the drive(s) yourself, but for disposal it is recommended that you physically destroy the drive. 

Actually I'd say that TRIM/garbage collection and wear levelling between them mean that you don't need to use secure erase with an SSD anyway, (unless it's an external SSD connected by USB because often those don't get TRIMmed), and that Drive Wiping a SSD is just a fancy mass delete of anything that hasn't already been deleted. (Making a 'Wipe Free Space' pretty useless on a SSD).

It is very unlikely that you will recover any file that has been deleted from an internal SSD, after a running a TRIM/garbage collection there should be no trace of it left. (and wear levelling may then even overwrite where it was).

Try using a recovery programme such as Recuva on your computers internal SSD, I've done it and it doesn't find any of my files that had been deleted normally.
(Oddly it did find some deleted System icons to recover, but I assume those are on a system partition that doesn't get TRIMmed, maybe the System recovery partition?)

Forensic recovery techniques might get something if wear leveling hasn't overwritten it since the TRIM, but unless you think that law enforcement is after your files then I wouldn't worry about anyone using forensic recovery.