How does a person reformat a hard drive?

Question

I am selling an old computer and I would like to remove all my information from the hard drive. Is reformatting the hard drive the best way to do this?

How do I reformat my hard drive?

Answer 1

If you have a Win 98 installation CD, you can boot it up with it.

At DOS mode, you type "format c:". It will format the HDD. Of course, if you have multi drive on the HDD, you can format other drive first. That does not include CD-ROM Drive.

Answer 2

Well, yes and no. When you reformat the hard drive, people with specialized tools can recover data from the drive itself. Plus, if you sell your computer with a reformatted hard drive, it will not have an operating system! Unless your buyer knows this and plans to install their own OS, then I'd advise against this.

The best thing to do would be to get a data erasing utility and delete everything you don't want to give out, such as everything in your "My documents" folder. You can buy such utilities at places such as COMP USA and I believe there are some free ones but their name escapes me.

If you still want to give up a computer with no operating system, then an easy way to reformat the hard drives would be either to do it from the commmand prompt or disk management.

For command prompt, type in a command such as this: Format C:/fs:NTFS change the drive letter according to your needs. You can use FAT, or FAT32 in place of NTFS but, unless you're planning on a windows 98 or lower OS being installed, stick to NTFS. This will reformat the drive.

From Start>control panel> Administrative tools>Computer Management>Disk management you can select partitions and disks to format, which will do the same thing.

But I'd highly recommend specialized software. I vaguely remember something in an orange box called "Secure erase" or something of the sort for not too much money that was specially for that. :)

Answer 3

You can format the hard drive, but you will be giving the other party a computer that is not ready to use. They will have to install Windows and whatever else.

You can go in and uninstall everything that has any presonal data, run a privacy program, and manually remove files that pertain to you. In addition, make sure you remove any mail and account settings from Outlook Express, clear the autofill options in your browser, and delete the directories that pertain to the programs you uninstalled.

If you want to be thorough, I guess formatting the drive and reinstalling Windows is the best option.

Answer 4

If you have sensitive information, formatting isn't enough. Download Darik's Boot and Nuke from and burn it to a CD. Boot off the CD and choose 'autonuke' to securely erase everything on all hard drives. Then reinstall Windows.

Answer 5

you cant format your hd because you would be deleting windows.i would just go into the control panel and delete programs then start deleting your personal files individually off your hard drive.