How to Reset a Hard Drive? Do It for Several Uses on Windows!

Why Reset Hard Drive

Can you reset a hard drive? Of course, this is available. Based on the uses, hard drive resetting attributes to several factors, as shown below:

• You need to reset your hard drive to improve your computer performance or make the drive ready to accept new information.
• The hard drive may show the wrong size and formatting this drive will restore it to full capacity. Here is a related post – Hard Drive Only Shows Half Capacity? How to Recover Its Data to help you know details.
• Your PC may get fairly sluggish after using it for several years, then you decide to invest in a new computer and sell or throw away this old machine. For security, you had better reset the hard drive to its factory settings to prevent it from leaking privacy.

Regardless of your purpose, make sure you follow the guide below carefully to reset your internal or external hard drive.

Back up All Essential Files Before Resetting a Hard Drive

The first step you should take is protecting your files by creating a backup for the disk data. No matter what your purpose is, selling or discarding or repartitioning your hard drive or saving new data to the disk, remember to back up important files since resetting the hard disk will erase the contents.

Work documents, movies, precious pictures, videos, and other data should be kept in a safe location such as an external hard drive, USB flash drive, network path, etc. Don’t overlook anything important by checking all the files and folders on your data partitions.

If you long for an all-in-one backup solution, MiniTool ShadowMaker works wonders. As one of the best backup software for Windows 11/10/8.1/8/7, it has the ability to backup files, folders, disks, partitions, and Windows systems with few clicks. Beyond these features, you can run it to effectively clone a hard drive to another disk for disk upgrade or backup, for example, clone SSD to larger SSD.

Without hesitation, get MiniTool ShadowMaker for a trial before you reset a hard drive.

MiniTool ShadowMaker TrialClick to Download100%Clean & Safe

Step 1: Double-click on the installer to finish the installation. And then connect your external hard drive to the PC, and launch MiniTool ShadowMaker.

Step 2: In the Backup tab from the left side, click the SOURCE section, hit Folders and Files > Computer, find and choose essential data, and click OK.

Step 3: Under the DESTINATION part, choose your external drive as the target drive.

Step 4: At last, click Back Up Now to begin the file backup.

Option 1: How to Reset Hard Drive to Factory Settings

Before discarding, selling, or donating your old computer, make sure there is no personal data on the hard drive, and resetting the disk to factory settings can be a good option. This assists in preventing leaking the sensitive data like bank credentials, private pictures, and anything else confidential.

Speaking of “how to factory reset hard drive Windows 10/11”, resetting the PC is worth a shot. Windows 11/10 allows resetting your machine when it doesn’t run properly. Also, you can implement the operation to reset a hard drive to its factory settings.

Case 1: A PC Can Boot as Usual

Step 1: Hit Start > Settings.

Step 2: On Windows 10, navigate to Update & Security > Recovery and click Get started under Reset this PC. On Windows 11, move to System > Recovery > Reset PC.

Step 3: When prompted by the Choose an option popup, hit Remove everything rather than Keep my files to erase all the information.

Step 4: Choose Cloud download or Local reinstall as per your needs.

Step 5: Complete the rest operations to reset a hard drive to its factory settings.

Also read: Reset Windows 10: Remove Files and Clean the Drive

Case 2: Your PC Cannot Boot to Desktop

In some cases, the machine fails to start up for some reason, so how to reset hard drive to factory settings? It is not challenging if you follow these instructions.

Step 1: Restart the system, force shut down it when the Windows logo or brand logo appears, and then repeat this step three times until the machine enters the automatic recovery screen. Then, hit Advanced options to enter WinRE (Windows Recovery Environment). Alternatively, an installation media or repair disk can help you boot the machine and then hit Repair your computer in the setup window to access WinRE.

Step 2: Go to Troubleshoot under Choose an option and click Reset this PC.

Step 3: Head towards Remove everything > Cloud download or Local reinstall > All drives > Fully clean the drive and begin the resetting task by hitting Reset.

You may wonder “how to reset hard drive without password” or “how to reset hard disk from BIOS”. Here are two related articles regarding resetting a PC without a password or from BIOS:

• How to Factory Reset Windows 11 Without Password? [4 Ways]
• How to Perform a Windows 10/11 Factory Reset from BIOS

Option 2: How to Reset a Hard Drive via the Wiping Method

Wiping your entire hard drive will be a better option as it can fully erase the disk data to avert data leaks. Talking about “reset external hard drive/internal hard drive”, consider this way if you no longer use the old external disk or PC.

In order to fully wipe your disk, we recommend using a professional third-party program such as MiniTool Partition Wizard. As a partition manager, it facilitates managing your disks and partitions including wiping a partition or disk. By writing zero, one, or zero and one, all the disk data is erased and overwritten, rendering the data unrecoverable. Beyond this, this utility adopts the wiping methods – DoD 5220.22-M and DoD 5220.28-STD, severally involving 3 or 7 secure overwriting passes.

Also read: DoD 5220.22 M: What’s Best DoD Wipe Software for Windows PCs

The security level is high, so why not get this tool for a try?

MiniTool Partition Wizard FreeClick to Download100%Clean & Safe

Step 1: Launch MiniTool Partition Wizard to access its main interface.

Step 2: Right-click on your external hard drive or hard drive that you don’t use anymore and choose Wipe Disk.

Step 3: When asked to choose a wiping method, tick the box of one as per your needs and hit OK.

Step 4: Finally, hit Apply to begin the wiping process to reset your hard drive.

In addition to MiniTool Partition Wizard, you have some other options to reset your disk and one is using MiniTool System Booster. Even though it serves as PC tune-up software to speed up the PC for optimal performance, it offers the Drive Scrubber feature to securely erase all data from a drive. Resort to this tutorial – How to Wipe a Hard Drive in Windows 11/10/8/7? 3 Ways for more information.

MiniTool System Booster TrialClick to Download100%Clean & Safe

Option 3: Format to Reset a Hard Drive

Sometimes, your hard drive doesn’t show the correct storage capacity, which may be attributed to virus infection, partition type, and other factors. Formatting the drive can be a useful way to address this issue. Furthermore, you can also choose to format your disk when you need to erase old data and make room for new files.

As far as resetting a hard disk via formatting is concerned, the partition manager, MiniTool Partition Wizard can also do a favor. Just right-click the target drive and choose Format, choose a file system, and then hit OK > Apply.

Besides this, Disk Management is also worth trying.

Step 1: Type disk management into Windows Search and hit Create and format hard disk partitions to open this utility.

Step 2: Right-click on the target drive and choose Format.

Step 3: Set Volume label, choose File system, tick Perform a quick format, and hit OK to begin formatting. To format the entire hard drive, repeat step 2 and step 3 for all the test partitions.

Option 4: Delete All Partitions to Reset a Hard Drive via Diskpart

Apart from formatting your hard drive, you can also choose to delete all its partitions by running Diskpart rather than wiping the disk.

Reset external hard drive via these steps:

Step 1: Open Command Prompt with admin rights.

Step 2: Type diskpart in the CMD window and press Enter.

Step 3: Execute the following commands in turn, pressing Enter after each one.

list disk

select disk n: n means the disk number.

clean

Step 4: Run this command – create partition primary size=20480 to create a 20.48GB primary partition. You can type the partition size as per your situation.

Step 5: Type assign letter=G and hit Enter. Replace G with any drive letter.

Step 6: Execute the command format fs=ntfs quick to format the primary partition to NTFS.

Currently, four common ways to reset your hard drive in Windows 11/10 have been introduced here. In regard to “how to reset external hard drive”, the first option – resetting the PC isn’t applied but the rest three ways make it easy to reset the disk.

Furthermore, if you are running a Mac, how to reset a hard drive? To find the way, move to the next part.

Reset Hard Drive on Mac

Perhaps you want to reset your hard drive to factory settings when the Mac doesn’t run well. In this case, you can run Disk Utility to fully erase all the disk data. Also, before proceeding, make sure you have backed up your important data using Time Machine, like resetting a hard drive on Windows. Then, follow the steps in this post – Full Guide on Erase and Factory Reset a MacBook Safely to reset the Mac.

How to Reset a Hard Drive Without a Computer

There is a related query when searching for how to reset a hard drive. We guess it means physically damaging the hard drive. In our previous post – How to Destroy a Hard Drive on Laptop/Desktop? See a Guide, you can find two reliable methods.

Final Words

From this post, you clearly know how to reset a hard drive including your internal and external hard drive on Windows and macOS. According to your situation, choose the proper one to reset the PC or wipe, delete, or format your drive.

No matter which way you use, remember to back up anything important on Windows 11/10 using MiniTool ShadowMaker before you proceed. Or else, data loss is a nightmare.

MiniTool ShadowMaker TrialClick to Download100%Clean & Safe