i need a program that will wipe or reformat my hard drive?

Question

i tried fdisk and i didnt get nowhere, i know there are programs out there that will reformat or clean the hard drive so that is like a new one but i have no idea what they are called and need one for one of my pc's and some other hard drives that i have and want to clean them up . if anyone know's of one what is it called and where can i down load it so that i can have a copy for later use and to use now

Answer 1

You already have it. It is called Format.com Now depending on your current operating system will tell you where it is.. You mentioned Fdisk. If you Fdisked correctly it should have wiped your hard drive to a preformatted state. Run Fdisk again. this time delete the partitions for the hard drive that you want to format. Create the new partition(s) that you want for that drive. Restart your computer. Now If your running a FAT32 OS than Format.com is in C:\windows\command. For XP (NTFS) it is in C:\windows\system32. Now unless you do Fdisk it first, YOU SHOULDN'T HAVE TO RUN IT MANUALLY. Instead doubleclick my computer, right click on the drive you want to format, and select format. If you do descide to Fdisk first, than you will have to run format.com through safe mode. Say you are running 98 and you want to format D:. simply restart your computer in MS-DOS mode, when it comes up you will get a prompt something like this. "C:\>" type in cd windows Now your prompt looks like "C:\WINDOWS\> " now type cd command now you should have "C:\WINDOWS\COMMAND\>" type in format d: /c /v:(and whatever you want to name the drive goes here) it will ask you if you are sure, hit y for yes. good luck

Answer 2

From what you're saying, you have to format a hard drive other than the one you're running Windows, If you are using Windows NT, 2000 or XP you can format a second unit from a build in application, look in Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Computer Management > Disk Management, here if you are logged in as an Administrator you can give format to drives with different file systems and even Delete or Create Partitions!.
If you need to format the main Hard Drive where you run Windows on, you can use the Windows Installation Disk (Windows 2k and XP are more friendly and straight forward) to Delete or Create Partitions. Give Format in FAT, FAT32 or NTFS (BTW, I recommend this File System). You can use Linux based applications as well but make sure if you get one of these to select the proper file system according to the operating system you will install in the future, search in www.download.com > "disk utilities".
If you're concern by security of your data, once you run the formatting, you MUST perform a shredding of the empty space or your data will be available for hackers and not even experts. You can use a FREE windows application called ERASER (http://www.heidi.ie/eraser/), this will eliminate any data by resetting 1 and 0 on in the free space of your drive. You can use different ways to do this, the program will explain pretty much everything. I believe when you buy a new drive all space is set to 0, if you choose within ERASER the last pass to set to 0 the space in the drive you'll end up with an unit pretty much like new (at least this has to be the 3rd pass, the more the better but also more time consuming).

Answer 3

You need to corrupt your harddrive bad enough that windows thinks it needs to completely start from scratch or it does a cheesy reinstall and keeps all your junk on it.

Make sure that you have the cd to be the first bootup in your bios. Usually you can get to your bios by pressing F8, F1, or delete when the computer is booting up.


Once your computer loads to windows on the start menu type in Cmd on the run line to open a dos window. Then type

cd\
delete*.*

and confirm.

Now restart your computer with the windows cd in it and it will go to a menu that will ask you if you want to reform your c drive.

Answer 4

you don't need to buy software at all. Everything can be done through windows. Use the help file to show you how. Purchasing software is a waste of money

Answer 5

Try here:

http://downloads.zdnet.com/search.aspx?kw=hard+drive

Zdnet are good for allsorts of tools and stuff.
I've used loads from here, obviously can't say how good or bad certain programs are.
Hope this helps.

Answer 6

put a windows XP CD and restart the PC

Answer 7

convinced it is going to, decrease back up your records, or once you've walls pass your records to there. The classes however can only be re-put in see you later as you've the application to attain this