What happens if I stop Wipe drive free space while still in process?

I want to wipe a general drive used for storrage (not a system drive) before giving to another person. Its 500 GB in size.

I started the single pass wipe hours ago and it still says there are 10 hours to go.

What happens if I stop the process mid stream? Will I have to start over again or will it pick up where it left off?

I need to reboot the system for an update but don't want to do that if it will put me back at square one.

Also, if there is a better way to accomplish this I'd love to hear that too!

Thanks a lot,

Kevin

It will start again from scratch. Ten hours is a long time for one pass on 500 gb.

if the new owner of your drive is a 'complete noob' then a quick format will suffice if you feel they wouldn't care or know how to recover data.

or to be sure, to be sure (well, OK, just making it a lot harder) doing a low-level format (not a Quick Format) will achieve the same results as wiping the drive with CC.

the overall time taken may not be much different though, but from memory, the last time a formatted a 500gig HD I seem to recall it took about 2'ish hours.

certainly more than 1 and no where near 10.

Going to try a 1 pass wipe on a new 500 GB drive and see if it is any quicker. Will compare to a a low-level format. I have a number of drives I want to sell off.

Yes, as Mta says a low-level format will overwrite all the sectors with zeroes. This only applies to Vista onwards, XP doesn't do the overwrite.

I would think that the format is faster than running CC. CC (using drive wiper erase function) will run a high-level format and then allocate and delete files, whereas a ll format just gets on with the overwrites as part of the format.