Hard Drive Deletion

[Str8Ridah]

What is the correct way to erase a hard drive? I'm trying to erase a hard drive to install in another computer. I've had the OS boot up with the floppy, but when I get the C prompt and use the command: format C:, I get a bad command message. Could one of you experts give me some advice?

[cyanide]

Well, if you put the hard drive in the new machine, then proceed with the installation, you will be prompted to format the drive.

[JayDrake]

You cannot format a drive when you are using data on that drive to run your operating system. What you need to do is use a boot disk, either a floppy or cd (windows installation cd's work) and boot from it rather than the hard drive. Generally when clearing a hard drive I will first run fdisk and delete all the partitions then create one new partition which takes up the full space of the drive then format that partition.

[alias420]

Jaydrake what do you mean? You can format a drive that is in use.

You probably dont have the format command on the floppy disk try copying format.exe. How did you create this boot disk? It should have been put on there if you had windows do it. Another tool would be to use fdisk but that is overkill.

Also using the windows CD to boot into an install will format the drive for you aswell.

[larry1]

If you don't have a bootable cd drive or older CMOS that do not allow booting from CDRom, copy 2 files fdisk.exe and format.com to your bootable A diskette. These files are in the C:\Windows\Command folder, depending on windows version.

Then reboot and reformat from a drive, ie.
A> format c: /s

Remember the '/S' for C drive to be bootable.

[imvain2]

For your Boot disk I would visit BootDisk.com, and download the correct files for the OS you are installing.

After you download them and follow the directions they give you to put the files on the disk you will be ready to go.

Everytime I goto someones house when they are upgrading or anything, I actually carry a boot disk I created from that website. The boot disk is a miracle worker to me. It has default CD Drivers so I can boot up to dos with CD Access. (I know I can change my bios to do the same).

I would recommend running FDISK just in case. Yes it might be a little overkill, but I from my experience its better to be safe then sorry.

When reformatting your harddrive I would suggest remove any other harddrives that are hooked up to that PC. Again, a little overkill but I have reformatted the wrong harddrive even though I typed in the correct drive letter.

[netman4ttm]

There are several ways to pull this off.

1. If the bios of your PC has a low level format option use that. (or if the drive is scsi use the scsi bios option to to the low level format)

2. Get the start up floppy for windows 95/98 or nt and type the following

format /mbr
then
format c:

[Ralyn]

You can get questions like this answered by an experienced technician at http://www.monkeyswithnuclearweapons.com. I designed this site for my boyfriend, who has 25+ yrs experience in building and repairing computers. The sites is far from being done but there is a discussion board to ask questions.

[netman4ttm]

Goofed

read
format /mbr
as
fdisk /mbr

sorry fingers moving before brain was in gear.

[alienzhavelanded]

Im still ROTFL at "fdisk is overkill". You humans are silly.

Happy coding,
The Martian