Disk - Clean and Clean All with Diskpart Command

A) In the elevated command prompt, type clean all and press Enter. You will see the command prompt below as is until the "clean all" command is finished. (see screenshot below)
NOTE: This will take quite some time (several hours or more) to finish depending on how large the disk is since it is writing over each and every sector on it to zero. Think of it as being like a full or low level format.

Question - shouldn't my hard drive light be doing a lot of blinking after typing clean all? I followed the steps and typed clean all but now I just have a blinking cursor under the line DISPART> clean all.

Brink said:

mjf said:

It may have been mentioned earlier but you can run the tutorial from the command prompt of a system repair disk if you can't or don't want to boot into the OS.

Oh no, I posted the above so he would know that "clean" will wipe the entire HDD so he wouldn't wipe his OS partition by mistake thinking "clean" would only wipe selected drive letters on HDD.

Ok I just meant that understanding what "clean" , "clean all" does to the "selected disk", you can use the system repair disk to perform the function.
Sorry if it confused your advice to the OP.

[This is my first post here, just registered]

I have executed this 3 times already. It's hard to determine if anything is happening. There is no message, just a blinking cursor. Is the process going on or not? Is there a way to tell? The HD is a 640GB Samsung HM640jj. I ran "clean" and it terminated almost immediately and it said successfully, but I don't know a lot about this stuff. I'm doing all this because I inadvisedly let a party run some code on my computer with logmein123, and now I'm paying the price, spending my day (and on into tomorrow, etc.) reinstalling everything.

I could run DBAN, but if "clean all" terminates successfully, I obviously won't have to. The concern, for the most part, seems to be that there was a rootkit placed on the system, and I want to be sure that going forward my computer will be secure.

Is it normal for DISKPART> clean all to be followed by a blinking cursor for hours, no indication of progress, nothing??? Thanks for help.

bpelowski said:

A) In the elevated command prompt, type clean all and press Enter. You will see the command prompt below as is until the "clean all" command is finished. (see screenshot below)
NOTE: This will take quite some time (several hours or more) to finish depending on how large the disk is since it is writing over each and every sector on it to zero. Think of it as being like a full or low level format.

Question - shouldn't my hard drive light be doing a lot of blinking after typing clean all? I followed the steps and typed clean all but now I just have a blinking cursor under the line DISPART> clean all.

Ah, I guess that kind of answers my question. It may be 3 hours or more before I see a "succeeded" message. Well, I think I will do some other stuff while this is going on...

It's a hard for me to tell about notifications here. It says I'm subscribed to this thread, but how do I ensure that I will get an instant email notification? I'm not a noob to forums, but the mechanics of this one has me confused. I confess, I'm easily confused... at times.

Brink said:

Hello dMuse, and welcome to Seven Forums.

Yep, unless you wanted to include a secure erase, then using the clean instead of clean all command would have been finished within a few moments. Eventually you'll get a completed message in the command prompt letting you know it's finished. It can take a while to finish depending on how the size of the HDD.

You should get an instant email notifcation about my reply post, and any other reply to this thread other than yours for as long as you are subscribed to it. :)

Hope this helps,
Shawn

What is a "secure erase?" Is that part of the DISKPART command? I certainly wanted to ensure that no malware etc. remains on the HD. Did a "clean all" not ensure that? Yes, I got an instant email notification when you posted, thank you. My Clean All did execute successfully after 2-3 hours.