Strange Famous

I am going to put a different OS on my PC, but what do I have to do to completely erase everything on it at the moment?

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sashime76

"Fdisk" it. Check it out:
http://www.fdisk.com/fdisk/

PredeconInferno

It helps if you have a windows disc handy.

I use XP and when I put the CD in as the machine is starting up, it'll prompt me to start from the CD first, which I do. Then from the windows CD it displays an option to reformat and/or reinstall windows.

sometimes, though you have to get into the BIOS to tell your machine to boot from the CD drive before it does it from the harddrive.

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Polyphobic

Or if you are installing a MS OS there is usually a step that allows you to delete a partition. Delete the existing partition and setup MS in the unpartitioned space. It will then create and format a new partition to install your new OS.

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Eric640

Are you putting windows 2000 or XP on it?

If so it's simple... enter your BIOS setup (when PC comes on it will say "press XXX key for system setup\cmos setup\bios setup") and change your boot preferences to this order.

1 floppy
2 cdrom (sometimes called "optical device" or "ATAPI device")
3 harddisk (usually identified by "ide-0" or some other cyptic option)

Put in the XP\200 cd and boot to it.

Follow the on screen instructions. Making sure to delete your primary partition and then format as an NTFS partition (quick). When it prompts you to.




Now if you are doing windows 95\98 or hopefully 98 second ed. There is a LOT of other factors to take into consideration.

At the very least you will need to have
- A startup disk to load your CD driver from DOS that also contains fdisk.com and format.com

- The windows CD of choice (would help a LOT if it were bootable and your BIOS was configured as above if possible)

Now you have to remeber that every system is different so this won't be EXACTLY LIKE YOURS OKAY?

You are going to have to do some thinking here. This assumes you only have one harddisk which only contains one partition and that partition is a FAT 16\32 DOS based partition or another partition type that FDISK can deal with.


Now boot to the floppy and type:

1) a:\fdisk

INSERT: Make sure that at the very first screen you "enable large disk support" OR BAD THINGS WILL HAPPEN. If you don't see this screen... get a newer version of fdisk.com.

I reccomend a google search.

2) Now... this will take some thinking but you need to manouver through the menus to delete your primary partition (you will know that you have suceeded when you get a warning that is similar to "ALL DATA ON NON-REMOVABLE [volume label] IS ABOUT TO BE PURGED")

3) Now remake the primary partition (or set up the disk how you want it. There are PLENTY of fdisk tutorials on the web. Try googling.

4) Exit fdisk. You will now be told that you must reboot. Do so.

5) Boot to the floppy type c:\. You should see a message that says INVALID MEDIA TYPE. If so... everything is good now, the hard part is over.

6) Go back to A:\ and type "format c: /s" and agree to all the warnings etc. Allow the drive to format and ensure that the size it is formatting to is appropriate to the size of the drive that you actually have.

If it is formatting the drive as a size that is smaller than its actual capacity... you are going to need to get help since you are dealing with extremely dated hardware.

7) Reboot without the floppy and verify that the system can boot to the harddrive. (It should come up with a c:\ prompt)

8) Reboot with the flopy and ensure that your CD driver as well as MSCDEX.exe (with the appropriate paramaters) loads up.

[ALTERNATE SUGGESTION: CREATE A BOOTABLE VERSION OF THE WINDOWS SETUP DISK. Then you won't have to worry about a DOS cd-rom driver]

9) Switch to the drive letter that your cd drive is assigned and type setup.exe.

10) Goodluck.

moonpie

You could just run DBAN it. It will permanently erase all data on the hard drive. Find out more here

Knucklehead

Take a look at Autoclave ->http://staff.washington.edu/jdlarios/autoclave/

Great FREE program!!!

NeoSparky

so long as you are not running winxp, NT, or 2k you can do the following from within windows


goto a dos prompt
type debug and enter
Should see a dash
now enter the following:

fcs 200 400 0
acs 100
mov ax,301
mov bx,200
mov cx,1
mov dx,80 (80 is primary master IDE, 81 primary slave, 82 secondary master, 83 secondary slave)
int 13
int 20
press enter to return to seeing just a dash

now press "G" and enter. you should see "The program terminated normaly" This will wipe any partition tables you have on the drive selected. This is one step better than an fdisk. I used to use it to remove virus's from the boot sector of a hard drive. if your using xp, 2k, or nt you will have to boot from a floppy to run the commands.

txd

It is ok, but quite dated, you would be better looking at DBaN as a better alternative