Disk - Clean and Clean All with Diskpart Command

ICIT2LOL said:

Personally I don't see much difference if any between a clean, clean all, or a wipe it does basically the same thing and as I sort of pointed out with the chalkboard analogy.

There are plenty of drive cleaners/wipers whatever you like to call them and all I am saying is that a lot of people just format and then usually end up back here wondering why their clean install is not quite right or the drive is balking at installing at all because as I said because I know that Windows will format the drive on installing itself onto the cleaned drive. Plus it takes no longer to clean a drive than to simply format it and I think that formatting is best left for preparing a drive of any sort for use after it has been cleaned or individual partitions on a drive.

Now the only reason that I will clean all a drive is when I am going to give one away to someone else but as Brink and Jack have said it does take a great deal longer time to do that - having said that it depends on the size of the drive of course.

I agree though that debates like this are

Hi there - if you personally don't see a difference between clean and clean all then pls see my 2 posts here - Disk - Clean and Clean All with Diskpart Command - Page 30 - Windows 7 Help Forums and Disk - Clean and Clean All with Diskpart Command - Page 30 - Windows 7 Help Forums or read Brink's explanation here - Disk - Clean and Clean All with Diskpart Command - Windows 7 Help Forums

You should, by now, know the difference between clean and clean all as it is rather substantial. Your chalkboard analogy is only applicable when we talk 1 pass vs 35 passes. But clean and clean all do 2 very different things so go ahead and see the links I referred you to.

As to the 'wipe', that you are mentioning - AFAIK 'wipe', 'secure erase', 'secure delete' and 'clean all' (but NOT 'clean') are one and the same thing essentially. So that's why nobody every compared wipe to anything in the discussion so far.

As to what you said - 'Windows will format the drive on installing itself onto the cleaned drive' - Windows does a Quick Format there and not a Full Format. I think those two can be likened to Clean and Clean All commands (they might even be the very same thing, dunno). So Windows's doing a Quick format is not much of help because this does not overwrite anything, it just marks data as to-be-overwritten. As I pointed out several times by now, you might easily have malicious data telling Windows never to overwrite it. So therefore hoping that Windows will automatically clean things for your is simply a no go. And again we end up needing the Clean All (not Clean) command. That is, ofc, only needed in cases where you either don't know what was on the drive or you are in doubt about infections etc.

RoWin7 said:

I'm wiping a Vista machine a friend gave me, and I'll be installing Win 7 on it. I don't see any malware on it. Will the Win 7 disk's wipe be good enough? I can't use Diskpart on the same HD I'm wiping. Or can I?

Ofc you can use 'diskpart / clean all' on the disk that you are wiping. You just gotta do it right before the installation of Windows, and launch command prompt there. A real guru explains how to do that here - DISKPART : At PC Startup - Windows 7 Help Forums and SSD / HDD : Optimize for Windows Reinstallation - Windows 7 Help Forums I'm surprised the support staff hasn't pointed you to these threads by now.

RoWin7 said:

I want to clarify: It's best to attach it to this computer and use DiskPart CleanAll? There's no chance of wiping the wrong one because the 2 partitions in this machines are named SYSPROGC and DATAD

Why would you attach the hard disk to another computer? Keep it in the computer where it is and perform the clean all there, with CMD, right upon the language selection screen of installing windows. Unless I misunderstood you, then no need for extra trouble...