Windows 10: I am resetting my laptop with Fully clean all drives option. Does that wipe out my SSD...

Please let me know

:)

 

Windows 10 Reset and "Fully Clean The Drive" on SSD

Ha ha.

So many replies and no one is answering the question - "Does the 'Fully clean the drive' (so that you can recycle your computer) clean an SSD drive?

I suspect that it doesn't and Microsoft are avoiding answering the question.

As so many new laptops are running on SSD drives this is a really important question.

...I've just reset my old laptop with an SSD (to sell it) and it now says (after several hours) that it was unable to clean all personal files and recommends that I reset the PC again :-/

:-( EDITED: I've now tried to reset 5 times. Seems Windows 10 has ceased to exist! The message I'm getting now says that my PC can not be recovered. This was supposed to be a Windows 10 recovery USB. It looks like it does everything that its supposed to
do, except in the end there's no recovery, only wipe! Wow, that's screwy.

 

Windows 10 Reset and "Fully Clean The Drive" on SSD

Hi,

I have a quick question about the "Fully Clean The Drive" option for Windows 10...

I have read that if you are planning on selling your computer you should reset Windows 10 and select 'Fully Clean The Drive'. I have read this is 'similar' to running format.exe c:\ /P:0, which would overwrite the whole drive
with zeros, making data recovery from a traditional HDD pretty much impossible.

My questions are

1) What exactly does fully clean the drive do? Does it overwrite the WHOLE drive or just delete user files and overwrite the free space? Because if it were to overwrite the whole drive how could it reinstall windows because there
would be no remaining data on the drive.

2) How does fully clean the drive work on SSD's? A single overwrite on a SSD would not be sufficient to sanitise the drive unless a TRIM command was also issued. Would fully clean the drive issue a TRIM command?

I guess my main question is how likely is it you can recover user data after you 'fully clean the drive' on an SSD?

Thank you in advance!

 

Windows 10 Reset and "Fully Clean The Drive" on SSD

@Ratandeep

Many thanks for your link. However, it appears that I have not been clear. I understand how TRIM works with SSDs.

What I was looking for was an answer to both the questions from the OP but, especially the second. For clarity, I shall reiterate (directly from the OP's post:

1) What exactly does fully clean the drive do? Does it overwrite the WHOLE drive or just delete user files and overwrite the free space? Because if it were to overwrite the whole drive how could it reinstall windows because there
would be no remaining data on the drive.

2) How does fully clean the drive work on SSD's? A single overwrite on a SSD would not be sufficient to sanitise the drive unless a TRIM command was also issued. Would fully clean the drive issue a TRIM command?

Personally, I would want to run TRIM rather than overwrite a WHOLE SSD but that's just me.

What I REALLY want to know is How does fully clean the drive work on SSDs and would it issue the TRIM command?

Regards

Joe.