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vinaur: you really should keep (at least) two partitions on a drive that size, if only one for your OS and programs and one for your data to avoid the situation you're currently in. If you had a 20 gig OS/programs partition and the rest data you could just format the OS partition when it was time to clean up and keep all your data. In addition, a 250 gig drive unpartitioned will lose you approximately 17 gigs of space.
danny_boy: a format will more or less get rid of everything. If you quick format it only erases the allocation tables, which means the data is still there but the computer writes over all the old stuff as it comes in. If this is a high-security situation, where you need to make sure everything is destroyed, you could get a program that writes garbage (ones) to every single bit on the hard drive -- but I don't think we're talking national security here. Formatting the computer clears it all out.
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it's quiet in here
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