Reformat??

[bullzi]

Good deal, I'm sure you won't have any major issues. It's a pretty straight forward process.

 

[copiman]

Well sports fans, I have wiped it clean. I bought a device that I can insert the drive and connect to another PC. I then formatted the drive.

Not sure if this is the right forum, but here goes. I am trying to install Windows 7 on it and when I select install now, it says "set up is starting" and then stops and pops up a box that says " A required CD/DVD drive device driver is missing. If I have a CD,DVD, or USB flash drive, insert now. Went to the manufactures (Gateway) site and cannot find it.
Gateway Support - Downloads & Support Documents - Desktop / GT Series / GT5628


Any ideas as to what to do?

 

[copiman]

Update:

It turned out that the optical drive itself was bad. Replaced the drive and loaded Windows 7 with no problem. Thanks to all that responded. I really learned a lot. I just thankful this forum is here. I just wish I could contribute more, but I'm still green.

 

[OneMarcilV]

Custom will be fine for what you want. Using third party programs to format makes that data un-recoverable by other third party programs. IE, you're selling the computer and don't want somebody to be able to recover your data.

If you use custom, that data is still technically there on the drive in a raw form but windows won't see it. You'd need a third party program to recover it, so; just use custom.

Which third party programme do you recommend. My external hard drive is also recognized as a RAW drive and what is weirder is the computer thinks this is a CD drive.

 

[OneMarcilV]

I just downloaded SwissKnife. That would not let me reformat the drive.

 

[copiman]

Which third party programme do you recommend. My external hard drive is also recognized as a RAW drive and what is weirder is the computer thinks this is a CD drive.

If your asking what third party program I used, it was dban. It will wipe everything on the drive. I needed a fresh start, which is why I used it.

 

[OneMarcilV]

If your asking what third party program I used, it was dban. It will wipe everything on the drive. I needed a fresh start, which is why I used it.

Going to give that programme a shot. Thank you much. I have no problem deleting the files off the drive.

 

[OneMarcilV]

Going to give that programme a shot. Thank you much. I have no problem deleting the files off the drive.

OK I was able to erase the external hard drive to where the computer sees the drive as a USB Mass Storage Device with out a drive letter assigned. How do I format that drive using DBAN?

 

[copiman]

If you erased it, then you don't need dban. Unless you want to not be able to recover data. If its a drive just for you then you have done what you need. Are you going to load an Operating system?

 

[OneMarcilV]

I was able to use the free version of EaseUS. Even though I removed all the partitions do even the computer did not even the drive anywhere. With EaseUS I was able to figure out how to create a partition and then format that.

Now things are groovy.

Shows up under MY COMPUTER as 500gb of storage.