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wiping hard drive

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by greymethod

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Is there a way to delete everything on your hard-drive without starting windows I.E. through the boot menu?

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by thechas

Not from the boot menu, as you are still booting from the hard drive.

You can boot from a startup floppy or CD and run utilities to clear the hard drive.

If you just wish to erase the drive and start over, I recommend the following:

Run fdisk.
Remove the primary partition;
logical drives if they exist;
extended partition if it exists.
Exit fdisk

Reboot from the start up disk and run fdisk again.
Partition the drive as desired.
Exit fdisk

Reboot and use the format command with the / s switch to make the hard drive bootable.

If you desire to totally wipe the hard drive prior to getting rid of the computer, you want to download and run any of the secure erase utilities.

One is:

http://www.heidi.ie/eraser/

There are others.

These overwrite your hard drive with a pattern of ones and zeros to make it nearly impossible to recover any data from the drive.

Chas

by daugherr

I'm trying to to format a laptop to install Windows XP over 2000, it won't do it saying there are install files on that partition. I then decided to Fdisk to start over but when I try to boot to the floppy it comes up with this error, "Invalid Hibernation Partition?.run HDPREPEZ or AMI Save to File Utility" Does anyone know how to get around this problem so I can move on to the better things in life? Thanks in advance for any help anyone can offer.

by hal 9000

There is also the option of running a Utility from a floppy that writes 0's to every sector of the HDD if you use this you are sure than nothing remains that can possibly mess up a clean install of Windows. These Utilizes are available from the individual drive makers so you can log onto one of the drive makers and download the Utility and Wipe the Drive. IBM now Hitachi used to have a good one but they no longer support this option and the last time I looked Maxtor had a copy that you could program the number of times that it wrote 0's to every sector.

That utility exceeded the DoD specifications but remember that if you have any sensitive data at all on the drive there is no way to totally remove it from a professional Data Recovery person so if you are thinking about selling the computer it is far more cost effective to replace the HDD and destroy the existing drive.

But if you just want a clean drive to install from the above will be the best alternative. The trouble with running FDISK and then Format is that it only writes to every third sector so you still have 2/3 of the data left on the surface of the drive.

Col

by cw_creativetouch

I want to sell my laptop and want to completely clean the hard drive of all infor. and then reinstall windows vista..
What do I nee to do?

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