how to wipe a hard drive

Boot off the XP CD and during Install, you can delete existing partitions and start from fresh. Or use FDISK or Ranish Disk Manager to repartition hard disk.

Here's how to wipe a hard drive that uses NTFS as a file allocation system. (If you don't know what that is, go here.)

You can do this one of two ways by using the Windows XP startup disks or if your computer supports a bootable CD-ROM -- most computers built since 2001 have this feature -- use the Recovery Console tool on the Windows XP CD-ROM. More on that shortly.

First, remember that reformatting a hard disk deletes all of the data that is on it, so make sure that you back up your data before you reformat the disk. That data is unrecoverable afterwards. It's gone forever.

To use the Windows XP Recovery Console to reformat a drive, follow these steps:

Start the computer by using the Windows XP CD-ROM (in the CDROM drive) or the start-up disks (in the floppy drive).
You need to go into your BIOS to change the boot sequence to do this making your CD-ROM drive your primary boot device. (How to do this.)

Once the computer has booted from the CD you'll see a "Welcome to Windows Setup" screen appear and after all the drivers have loaded (shown along the bottom), press F10 or wait and choose to use the recovery console (choose item #2).

In the "Recovery Console" (learn more about that that is at Microsoft.com click here), specify the appropriate Windows installation. It will be listed. It's probably #1. Then log on by using your Windows XP Administrator password. You are probably the administrator and the password if you have never assigned is probably blank, so just hit the Enter key. If you run Windows XP Pro and want to turn off the password prompt then learn how here.

Next, type:

map

and hit the ENTER key.

Next, type:

format C: /fs:ntfs

Or if you don't want to format C, use the drive letter of the hard drive that you want to format. Hit your ENTER key.

Next, type:

y

Then press ENTER to continue. When the formatting process is finished, type

exit

and then press the ENTER key to restart the computer.

When I think "Wipe", I always think of DBAN : http://dban.sourceforge.net/

To wipe an entire HDD, simply create the boot floppy /CD, boot to it, and type autonuke at the prompt. Takes a bit linger, but this is the only way to ensure that EVERYTHING is gone forever.

WARNING: Using DBAN on a computer will make dta recovery using commercially available software all but impossible. Make sure that you have saved everyhting you want to other media before using it.

If you are just wanting to erase the hard drive and start over, boot to a windows 98 floppy and using fdisk delete the partition(s).

Reboot and using fdisk again create a new partition.

If you want to secure erase the drive there are applications that will do that also.

Give us a little more detail and we can narrow the answers toward that.

Lee

There is lots of utility which can wipe your hard drive because formatting doesn't erase data permanently. I have faced same situation and then i got a utility name stellar drive wipe software which delete data beyond recovery. You can get it from here...htttp://www.drive-wipe.com

There is lots of utility which can wipe your hard drive because formatting doesn't erase data permanently. I have faced same situation and then i got a utility name stellar drive wipe software which delete data beyond recovery. You can get it from here...htttp://www.drive-wipe.com

Hi,

If you want to wipe your drive then you can do it with format command. But format doesn't erase data completely, some viruses are very strong which affect boot sector. In this situation, you can use stellar drive wipe utility which wipe your drive completely beyond recovery.

more information: http://www.drive-wipe.com