zeroing out just one partition

[nightanole]

I, and several other people, have pcs with that dam recovery partition on the hard drives. I want to keep that partition for the not so bright folks here. However i want to zero out and reinstall the windows partition. How would i zero out just one ntfs partition, with only a cd rom to boot from. I cant install the hard drive in another machine. I just want to do the old format C:\ job and then zero it out.

 

[drizzt81]

Let me see that I understand you correctly:
1. you want to leave the recovery partition intact.
2. you want to format the Windows install partition
3. you are planning to reinstall windows.

Why then do you need to zero out the windows partition? Formatting does a fine job for removing the data for a reinstall.

If you really needed to zero out/ wipe a single partition, I am sure that there are some tools (dban ?) that will do such a thing for you. You can probably use them with BartPE.

 

[allbad]

here's a linux solution:

boot with knoppix or fedora recovery cd.
run 'fdisk -l /dev/hda' and identify the partition in question.
use 'dd' to write zero's to the partition: 'dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda1' (assuming hda1 is the partition you identified using fdisk -l)