looking to wipe hard drive clean

[maverickk]

after installing diffrent os systems and trying dirrrent programms imy pc is slow and really need to wipe my hard drive clean it there any good programms out there i can use that is quick and easy to use.

[berry120]

Your hard drive shouldn't slow down if you've reformatted it lots of times - from what you've said it might be that the drive itself is failing. Have a look in the BIOS and see if you can check its SMART status.

[Jacob..]

Originally Posted by berry120

Your hard drive shouldn't slow down if you've reformatted it lots of times - from what you've said it might be that the drive itself is failing. Have a look in the BIOS and see if you can check its SMART status.

I think he is trying to say he wants to reformat it now , as it has a lot of stuff he wants to get rid of.



Anyhow, if you use windows(most likely you do) if you have a restore disk than you can have it wipe your drive when you reinstall windows, or if you need to wipe a secondary drive you can use disk management.

[officemanager]

Originally Posted by maverickk

after installing diffrent os systems and trying dirrrent programms imy pc is slow and really need to wipe my hard drive clean it there any good programms out there i can use that is quick and easy to use.

Look up hard drive manufacturer and see if they have a disk manager program download as this will have utilities for wiping and reformatting it.

[berry120]

Look up hard drive manufacturer and see if they have a disk manager program download as this will have utilities for wiping and reformatting it.

Why?!

Any OS you'll need to install these days (including windows and Linux) will, before the main install starts, give you an option to set up partitions on the disk. When you come to install your OS of choice simply delete all current partitions on the drive and create a new one to house your new OS.

[officemanager]

Originally Posted by berry120

Why?!

Any OS you'll need to install these days (including windows and Linux) will, before the main install starts, give you an option to set up partitions on the disk. When you come to install your OS of choice simply delete all current partitions on the drive and create a new one to house your new OS.

I assume he wants all traces of info removed.
He wants his hard drive wiped clean, OS will only do a high level format.
Most Disk manager utilities have a program to wipe clean the hard drive and do a low level format.

[j03]

^

I don't think he needs all traces removed... he just wants to format so that his computer get's "un-clogged"!

[berry120]

Most Disk manager utilities have a program to wipe clean the hard drive and do a low level format.

No they don't - they usually have a program to do a zero-fill (which is what you mean), but practically no modern hard drives can ever be LLF'd outside the factory (and there's no need to.)

As a side note, it's a hugely common myth that selecting a regular format as oppose to a quick format in windows will do a zero-fill on the drive rather than just removing the files - this is complete and utter gibberish. The difference is a regular format will scan the drive for bad sectors, a quick format won't. The scan for bad sectors is what takes up all the time!

[root]

besides which...

a high level format would only get rid of the fat table, and reset sectors, not actually remove information, just remove the pointers to information.

A low level format involves numbering sectors, and it's factory only operation, it can't be done in the home, (not since the 80's anyway!)

and to securely erase you don't want to format at all you want to scrub the disk.

[Comp_Pro]

Download the GParted live ISO image, burn it to a disk, boot off the disk, use it to shred the harddrive