Disk - Clean and Clean All with Diskpart Command

Shawn,

My Win 7 HDD contains the automatic Windows 7 install with 2 partitions, System Reserved and a "C" partition.

After reading the thread (great stuff :) ), I have a couple of questions about the "clean" and "clean all" commands:

- Does the "clean" command accomplish the same thing as deleting both partitions from the Disk Management Console, with the addition of deleting the MBR when using the "clean" command? I'm guessing that partition-deletes from the Console won't delete the MBR since it's located prior to the beginning of the first partition, the System Reserved partition.

- Does the "clean all" command unhide and overwrite any "Host Protected Area" sectors, more known as the HPA? Those are typically located after the last user partition on a HDD, for those HDD's the contain a HPA.

After reading some articles about HPA's, it would appear that one would need to "unhide" the HPA before most disk-wipe tools can access that area to overwrite any data located within the HPA.

Seatools (Dos) and "HDDErase" will unhide the HPA but "DBAN" doesn't access that area according to the DBAN's site FAQ section.

I think there is a Linux command that will unhide the HPA but I don't recall that command at present.

Brink said:

Hey Scoop, :)

"Clean" and "Clean all" both will completely wipe the hard drive of all partitions hidden or not.

The only difference between them is that "Clean all" includes a 1 pass override secure erase, and "Clean" doesn't.

10-4, thanks :). You just saved me a couple of steps during my periodic "pre-cloning" routine :).

Brink said:

You're welcome. Yeah, unless you just need to do a secure erase, I would use "clean" to save time.

Yes. I usually do a "pre-cloning" delete of partitions, only to make it easier for me to identify the Target HDD within cloning software since it will appear as unallocated. This command saves me some "clicks" and steps :)

Thank you Shawn - I followed the excellent directions but get the following errors (snip below)

"Virtual Disk Service Error: Clean is not allowed on the disk containing the current boot, system, pagefile, crashdump or hibernation volume." note that I am not trying to format the OS drive, just a HDD that was originally in a raid configuration with another identical drive that I formatted & accidentally made Virtual. Now I just want to get it back to mirroring it's twin again. Can anyone help?

Thank you!

I'm use to clean command when install window. Pls help me recover data. Thank all very much (