Erase hard drive withought OS ?

01-07-2008	#1 (permalink)
Tfast500 Just Joined! Join Date: Jan 2008 Location: USA Posts: 10	Erase hard drive withought OS ? My dad has windows XP on his laptop but doesnt have the XP boot disk he wants to clean up his computer and reformat his hard drive how do i reformat a hard drive withought using an OS cd such as windows or Linux can he just erase his whole hard drive in bios or something?
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01-07-2008

#2 (permalink)

Jonathan183

Linux Guru

Join Date: Oct 2007

Location: Bristol, UK

Posts: 2,276

Quote:

Originally Posted by Tfast500

My dad has windows XP on his laptop but doesnt have the XP boot disk he wants to clean up his computer and reformat his hard drive

how do i reformat a hard drive withought using an OS cd such as windows or Linux

can he just erase his whole hard drive in bios or something?

Try the PartedMagic CD.

01-07-2008	#3 (permalink)
bigtomrodney /etc/init.d/moderator Join Date: Nov 2004 Location: Sunny South-East of Ireland Posts: 5,825	If you need to make the data unrecoverable try Darik's Boot and Nuke (DBAN). You can find it on sourceforge.net Just curious though, if you are cleaning you your system why don't you want to involve an OS? Why not just format it while reinstalling? __________________ Registered Linux user #378740 New members read here / Forum Rules #linuxforums on irc.freenode.net

01-07-2008	#4 (permalink)
ozar Super Moderator Join Date: May 2004 Posts: 11,200	Yeah, you can easily use the PartedMagic LiveCD as suggested above by Jonathan to either simply delete the current partitions, or to format them. Another option would be to boot the same LiveCD, go to a terminal, and enter: Code: dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda bs=512 count=1 That should totally wipe the drive including the MBR and give you a fresh start just as if you'd put a new drive in the machine. Have fun with Linux! __________________ oz New Members: * click here *

01-07-2008	#5 (permalink)
Tfast500 Just Joined! Join Date: Jan 2008 Location: USA Posts: 10	thanks guys! he doesnt have a new windows xp yet so wanted to get his hard drive ready for a fresh new install by the way im loving my linux havent figured out how to use python programming on it yet but hope to learn soon

01-07-2008	#6 (permalink)
ozar Super Moderator Join Date: May 2004 Posts: 11,200	Ok, have fun with Linux and don't hesitate to post new threads with any new questions! __________________ oz New Members: * click here *

07-21-2008	#7 (permalink)
bindray Just Joined! Join Date: Jul 2008 Posts: 1	Hi to all, If you doesn't have bootable OS cd then you can use some wipe software to erase your hard drive. Because OS cd will simply format the partition but doesn't delete data permanently so you should use drive wipe software or file eraser to delete data permanently. Theses softwares comes in form of bootable Cd.