wiping/restoring hard drive

[wjr]

How do you wipe a hard drive? I've got the system restore disks and everything, but no idea on how I'm supposed to actually wipe the hard drive clean.

Any help would be appreciated.

[robnix]

How do you wipe a hard drive? I've got the system restore disks and everything, but no idea on how I'm supposed to actually wipe the hard drive clean.

Any help would be appreciated.

Are you getting rid of this drive or just reinstalling?

[Glickman]

i think i you want to reformat the HDD

this will wipe the entire HDD

-put in the system disks in the computer and when your prompted with "Press any key to boot from disk" press enter.

-press f8 or whatever to continue through the legal crap

-press esc to get out of the current partition

-highlight the C: drive and hit "D" for delete

-hit "L" to confirm

----------------------------------

to put a new copy of windows back on

-select the unpartitioned space and hit enter

-select the appropriate size

-click ntfs

enjoy

[wjr]

Yeah, I want to reformat it.

Thanks glickman.

[d4m4don3]

How do you wipe a hard drive? I've got the system restore disks and everything, but no idea on how I'm supposed to actually wipe the hard drive clean.

Any help would be appreciated.

What kind of restore disks are they?
Is it just the os and drivers?
Or is it a complete system image?

[Sir_Brass]

a system image is os and drivers.

either way, the disks, if they're reinstalling the OS, let you do a partition/repartition (wipe and reformat) before reinstalling the OS. That's how you go about a reformat/reinstall.

If your HDD has gotten a number of bad sectors, though, when doing the reformat, don't do a quick reformat, but a FULL reformat. Also, if you need to do the FULL reformat, then do it one evening a few hours before you go to bed, and check on it again in the morning. Yeah, it can actually take that long. The disk will check each little sector of that HDD to make sure it's good or bad, then format the partition so that all bad sectors will be excluded (you don't want to write data to a bad sector....that's how things get randomly corrupted or disappear all-together).