Still, I want to keep this as a place for my occasional rant (not too many of those nowadays) and as a place to keep short technical notes that are useful to me and, hopefully, others.
With that in mind, here's one I often come across: my way of wiping disks on Windows.
Why would I do this? For me, the most prevalent use case is to reformat USB flash drives for reuse.
Short and sweet:
- Open an Administrator command prompt on Windows (cmd.exe on Start menu plus CTRL-SHIFT-ENTER).
- Start the 'diskpart' utility
- Get a list of available disks - 'list disk'
- Select the target disk - 'select disk #' (obviously substitute # for your target disk)
- Clean the disk with 'clean'
- Exit with 'exit'
OK, done. There's more that can be done with 'cleanall' (more thorough disk wiping) but for me this is sufficient.
I hope this helps others. Naturally, use it at your own risk.
