My dad has an SSD that currently has Linux installed, and he wants to wipe it clean to repurpose it for a Windows installation. I'm not too sure about the best way to do this. Can anyone provide detailed steps or suggestions?
4 Answers
You can either connect the SSD to a working Windows machine and use diskpart or the Disk Management GUI tool to delete the partitions. Alternatively, you can just wipe the partitions during the Windows installation process.
You don't have to securely delete the SSD if you're just going to use it with Windows. Just repartition the drive. For example, using Gparted, it only takes about 10 seconds to create a new partition table. Then, you can format it to NTFS if you want, or just leave it unallocated and let Windows handle the rest.
You can wipe the SSD by deleting or formatting the partitions using Windows' Disk Management tool or via the command line with diskpart. Check out Microsoft's official guides for step-by-step instructions.
You could just go ahead and install Windows on it. However, keep in mind that Windows might not recognize the SSD immediately if you don't wipe it first.
Yeah, that's true. If the SSD isn't recognized, you might need to wipe it first for Windows to see it properly.