9.5 Erasing the Disk

This section applies to standard hard drives. It does not apply to self-encrypting hard drives. For information about erasing a self-encrypting hard drive, see Section 10.5, Erasing the Disk.

The Emergency Recovery application can perform a secure erase of a standard hard disk. The process removes all data from the disk. This includes both encrypted and unencrypted volumes.

  1. Make sure you have launched the Emergency Recovery application and loaded the device’s ERI file. See Launching the Emergency Recovery Application.

  2. Click the Administration menu > Wipe Data (for BartPE) or Erase Harddrive (for Windows PE), then follow the prompts.

    It takes approximately 30 to 40 minutes to erase 10 GB of data, so the entire process can take a long time.

  3. When the erasure process is complete, close the application.

  4. Shut down the device.