Erasing The Entire Harddrive
 

How do I erase the entire contents of my harddrive including OS? I am getting ready to upgrade the OS and I don't want any remnants of Win ME floating around. Thanks for any info.

put in a dos bootdisk and get to the command prompt.

now, type in "format c:" (or whatever the drive letter is).

that should wipe it all off.

On Win ME the option to make a DOS bootdisk is in the control panel, under either the "Add/Remove Programs" panel or the "System" panel, can't remember which.

It depends on which OS you're upgrading to. Tell us which OS you're installing after the format and I'll do my best to tell you the best course of action! Also, are you buying a full OS, or just an upgrade OS?

-Lasereth

If you are upgrading to Windows XP, you will have the option to automatically wipe the drive before installation. Just boot from the XP disc, instead of your hard drive. Your motherboard manual can guide you through the BIOS to make that change. It's not too difficult :).

Yeah, I was gonna suggest that exactly, but I didn't know which OS he's installing. It's a bit more complicated if he's not using XP. :) I love CD bootable OS's.

-Lasereth

I have, as of now, XP Home Upgrade. Because I of glitches galore I want to upgrade to a full/clean install of XP Home. I started out with ME, then got the XP upgrade and now I want a full version (hopefully without all the glitches). Thanks for any help, suggestions, etc.

I would have thought all this correct until lately. I thought that a full format (with the xp disk or without) does not format the master boot record. Perhaps someone can explain that a bit better, or at leats make fun of me if I am wrong....

If you have an upgrade, you cannnot format the whole hard drive. The upgrade will not do a full install, that is what a full version is for. You would have to install your previous OS then install the XP upgrade. If you have a full version of XP, I'm sure that you can have an option to format the hard drive (just like 2000)? I have never installed XP but I would assume that they have the same install proceedures? Can anyone clearify that?

You could also download a free utility called BCWipe. There is a part of the program that you put on a DOS boot disk, it will allow you to wipe the hard drive with up to 7 passes (DOD standard). it can be time consuming, but it is like having a brand new drive. I have used this several times.

Yeah, in order to truly clean the drive you need to wipe it. It even over writes partition tables (so be careful). You can get the program off the IBM website. It's called Wipe. You just extract it to a boot disk and run it from a dos prompt.

An Upgrade CD will do a perfectly clean install even on a new formatted Hard Drive. First it looks for installed components, does not fine any, Setup will ask you to insert a CD with a previous version of Windows such as any version of WIN98 to verify that you owe a previous version, after a few seconds Setup will ask to swap the CDs and VIOLA, it will do a clean install. Same is true with Win98 Upgrade that wants to see a WIN95 CD and a WIN95 Upgrade CD wants to see a few diskettes from WIN3.1 etc.

The best solution in my opinion is to suck it up and buy Windows XP Professional. I know it's a good bit of money, but it's worth it. Auto-format features whenever you want to re-install, no upgrade crap, and one hell of an OS. Upgrading seems to never work for me. The few times it did on a friend's computer all he got was constant weird errors in Windows.

-Lasereth

The DoD degausses, then SHREADS thier hard drives. I shit you not.

This old chestnut again :)

To securely wipe everything off a hard drive I would suggest using dban

If you want to securely wipe files or free space from a windows machine I would suggest using eraser

I'm getting ready to go from ME to XP home via a clean install next week myself. One of the things that's giving me nightmares though is after the drive is formated, what if it doesn't read my cd drive? I've had this problem years ago, so not sure if it still happens, and the only internet access I'd have available readily would be the library to troubleshoot it on. Any thoughts?

There shouldn't be an issue, first check in your BIOS to make sure the CD-ROM is ahead of the hard drive in the boot order.

If there is a problem, spend $40 and get a new CD-ROM drive, hell get a DVD-ROM for that price.

Yeah, it shouldnt be a problem. The worst that could happen is that the BIOS will boot to the HDD before the CD--meaning you have to go into the BIOS and change it. No biggie :)

Even if you have a bootable os cd I would still have a bootdisk lying around just in case.

You might also want to download autopatcher gold. It has a bunch of xp tweaks and service packs and will save you a lot of time doing a bunch of install/reboots.

Yeah, that's fine and good for military secrets, but for the average Joe...? C'mon... no one needs all that. I mean, what's on your computer that needs to be destroyed that badly? Stolen space plans from NASA?

I scoff at software utilities for destroying evidence. Odds are, people using them are just trying to hide their warez, mp3z, and pr0n from computer forensics. Truth is, no one cares. Everyone's got that on their computer too. No one's gonna spend the money to dismantle your harddrive in a clean lab to find out if you downloaded the HL2 source code.

The only people that would need the ultra-secure data erase programs are those who have kiddie porn and the Government (CIA, FBI, DoD)