How Do I Completely Erase C: Drive?

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Guest

I have an old computer that I'm going to donate. I want to completely erase
the C: drive. I don't see any options in XP to do this and I also tried
creating an MS-DOS startup disk but when it boots to A: it does not see C:.

How can I accomplish this?
 
Go to the HD Manufacturer's web site and download the floppies for
formatting and partitioning your hard drive. Put the floppy the machine,
boot up and follow the directions. Choose complet format, which should take
hours, and will write zeros all over your hard drive.

Alias
 
Paul said:
I have an old computer that I'm going to donate. I want to completely erase
the C: drive. I don't see any options in XP to do this and I also tried
creating an MS-DOS startup disk but when it boots to A: it does not see C:.

How can I accomplish this?
Click to expand...


You have to format your drive
 
You will NEVER be able to totally erase everything on the drive.

You can make it unrecoverable against anyone but a government or a
determined recovery lab, but they'll still be able to get everything back.

Darin's Boot and Nuke is your best choice though.

Matt Gibson - GSEC
 
On the DOS diskette make sure you have FORMAT and FDISK on it.

When you boot to DOS run FDISK. Select the drive you want to format. Select
the option to delete NON DOS Partition. After you do this you will need to
create a new DOS partition.

The reason you can't see the drive when booting to DOS is because it's an
NTFS partition and DOS can't read it.

This isn't much but hope it helps.

Bob Eyster
 
In
Paul D said:
I have an old computer that I'm going to donate. I want to
completely erase the C: drive. I don't see any options in XP
to do
this and I also tried creating an MS-DOS startup disk but when
it
boots to A: it does not see C:.
Click to expand...


That's becasue your drive is NTFS, and MS-DOS can't see an NTFS
drive.

How can I accomplish this?
Click to expand...


It all depends on how paranoid you want to be.

1. You can simply reformat the drive and reinstall Windows. That
makes it difficult for anyone to recover anything.

2. You can run one of the several third-party utilities that
overwrites the drive with zeros multiple times. That' makes it
much harder to recover anything.

However note that there exists sophisticated techniques that
sometimes work at recovering data even from drives overwritten
multiple times. That's why the US government doesn't rely on any
such software techniques, but physically melts drives containing
really sensitive data in a furnace.

So there's no such thing as perfection, and you have to decide
what's good enough. If it were me, step 1 would be fine. It's
highly unlikely that someone you donated a drive to would know
how or want to go to the trouble of looking for anything on it.
 
Paul said:
I have an old computer that I'm going to donate. I want to completely erase
the C: drive. I don't see any options in XP to do this and I also tried
creating an MS-DOS startup disk but when it boots to A: it does not see C:.

How can I accomplish this?
Click to expand...


To protect your personal information and data from any future users
of average skills, you should, at the very least, format the hard drive
and reinstall only the OS and those applications whose licenses are to
be included in the transfer. If you wish to do a more thorough job of
protecting your personal data, WipeDrive 2.2.1
(http://www.accessdata.com/Product07_Overview.htm?ProductNum=07) meets
U.S. DoD standards for securely cleaning surplus unclassified hard
drives, and could be used before formatting and reinstalling the OS and
applications.


--

Bruce Chambers

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You can have peace. Or you can have freedom. Don't ever count on having
both at once. - RAH
 

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