Erase hard drive withought OS ?

[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?

[Jonathan183]

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.

[bigtomrodney]

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?

[oz]

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:

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!

[Tfast500]

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

[oz]

Ok, have fun with Linux and don't hesitate to post new threads with any new questions!

[bindray]

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.