How to wipe clean a hard drive?

[Walter R.]

My IDE C drive is 7 years old and holds only 20 GB. I would like to replace
it with an 80G (data backup) drive that is as good as new but has 5
partitions on it, which I need to wipe out in order to use it as a C drive.

Can I use Win XP SP2, somehow, to wipe the 80 GB clean to get rid of all
partitions, and all formatting? How do I restore the 80 GB drive to 'like
new' condition?

If Windows cannot do this job, I thought of getting Acronis Disk Director.

Thanks for any suggestions.

 

[Anna]

My IDE C drive is 7 years old and holds only 20 GB. I would like to
replace it with an 80G (data backup) drive that is as good as new but has
5 partitions on it, which I need to wipe out in order to use it as a C
drive.

Can I use Win XP SP2, somehow, to wipe the 80 GB clean to get rid of all
partitions, and all formatting? How do I restore the 80 GB drive to 'like
new' condition?

If Windows cannot do this job, I thought of getting Acronis Disk Director.

Thanks for any suggestions.

Walter:
We're assuming your 80 GB HDD is properly functioning. So using Disk
Management after you boot to your 20 GB HDD, simply delete the partitions on
the 80 GB disk. You can then, should you choose, make a fresh install of XP
onto that 80 GB HDD either creating a single partition or multi-partition
that drive should you choose. Alternatively, you could clone the contents of
your (I assume) single-partitioned 20 GB HDD to the 80 GB HDD (there would
be no need to partition/format that 80 GB HDD in that case) using a
disk-to-disk cloning program. Obviously you surely know that either way any
& all data on the 80 GB HDD would be "gone with the wind", right?
Anna

P.S.
BTW, whatever happened to your 500 GB "hot" HDD?

 

[Bob I]

Plug it in as a secondary drive and then use Disk management to delete
the partitions

 

[Wayne Wastier]

See here: http://www.michaelstevenstech.com/cleanxpinstall.html