Question about Vista and formatting.

[tylerhskate]

Ok heres the deal. I have a maxtor 80gb hard drive that needs to be formatted. My friend has 2 vista recovery cds from hp. Wont I be able to unhook the master drive that im using now and hook up the maxtor and boot from the vista cd so that I can format?

 

[OmegaAvenger]

Yes. But if its IDE you could hook it up a slave drive. Or if its SATA hook it up to another channel.

Boot into Vista. Right click on Computer/My Computer
Click Manage
Go into Disk Management
Select the Maxtor Drive and format it. Much easier.

 

[tylerhskate]

Well right now XP Home is installed on it. Wouldnt I be able to boot from the Vista CD and format it? I am formatting it so that I can sell it. I dont plan to install Windows, Ill let him do that.

 

[OmegaAvenger]

Well right now XP Home is installed on it. Wouldnt I be able to boot from the Vista CD and format it? I am formatting it so that I can sell it. I dont plan to install Windows, Ill let him do that.

same thing applies to xp. same steps.

And yes you can boot to the CD but it takes far longer to boot from the cd than to do what I mentioned.

 

[Catweazle]

Wouldnt I be able to boot from the Vista CD and format it? I am formatting it so that I can sell it.

HP recovery disks are generally not 'Vista install disks'. Instead they are generally drive images which can be deployed to original or replacement drive to restore the system to its original, factory-shipped preinstalled state. If what you have available is that then it won't be useful for booting and wiping the drive.

Drive manufacturers have downloadable maintenance tools (in iso format which creates bootable CD - look for the 'for DOS' download) which can allow you to nuke and/or zero-fill partitions. If what you have is a Recovery disk rather than a Windows disk that'd be the thing to use. Partition management software generally allows such tasks to be run from bottable CD also.