How do I wipe my hard drive clean?

R

RedScare

Limp Gawd
Joined
Sep 22, 2003
Messages
138
hey guys, i know this question should be easily answered but im just not sure how to do it. im building a new system but i am porting several things over from my old system including the vid card and the hard drive. i want to wipe my C drive completely clean so i can install the OS on a fresh drive. i know it wont work if i just boot from the XP cd cause it will give me the option of either a repair install (which i dont want) or a full install (which is not effective of wiping the drive clean. i have done this and there have been remnants of old applications left over). so how would i go about formatting my C drive in the new system so i can install XP fresh?

oh, and if it makes any difference, my C drive is just a partition of my 120G hard drive, and i want to keep the other partitions completely intact as they house all my data and music and what not.

*i posted this over at anandtech and was told by a couple of people that installing via the XP cd would, in fact, wipe my drive clean. but i contend that it does not do as good a job as i would like, leaving behind icons of previously installed programs. so im looking for some other way (if there is one...)
 
I have never had icons and stuff left over after I formatted a drive. Best advice I can give is back up all your stuff, just be to safe and format it using the XP disk. Look around on www.google.com for something else if you don't think MS' program isn't good enough.
 
when i format I go all out

First I reset my Raid array back to single drives
then I use the Western Digital Utility to write zeros fully to both drives
then I format Full with XP CD (NTFS)
then i install windows
 
Well, if you have a floppy you can make a boot disk and use the DOS format command. If not, then the Ultimate Boot CD has a couple of tools that will 0 write the drive (multiple passes available).

Plus, it's got a ton of other extremely useful tools for various other computer issues.
 
move everything over to the new pc, put the xp cd in, new instal, delete the partition, repartition, format, instal, do a happy dance, load updates.

formatting should whipe out your drive, but if not repartitioning, and then reformating will. If that still doesnt work, put that HD in another pc, and have that pc format it, partition it in a strange way, or fromat in fat32 and then go back to ntfs that sould scramble everything and you should be ok to instal, there are other ways but well i dont know them, like a low level format referd to as "writing zeros" b/c you literaly tell the HD in binary 00000000, thus making what every it had on there (1010111001011) just nothing (00000000) but im not sure how to do that,

good luck
 
thanks for the advice. i have two hard drives in the computer i have now. i only plan to move one over into the new system. so i may install WinXP on my second hard drive (currently its empty) and then boot to that OS and delete the partition on the other drive from there. kind of a hassel but that way i will know for sure that its gone.
 
Just for future reference...another good format tool is autoclave. I use it for almost every format I do. It doesn't take very long, it works well, it's free and extremely simple to use. Good luck.
 
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