How do I remove everything from the hard drive

I am send my 2 year computer to a friend of mine and i want to remove the information off the hard drive. So How do i completely format the hard drive?

Hi, if you still have your installation disk then the easiest way would be to re-install windows. Just set the bios to boot from disk and complete a custom install. This will give your friend a shiny new installation.

Originally Posted by kemical

Hi, if you still have your installation disk then the easiest way would be to re-install windows. Just set the bios to boot from disk and complete a custom install. This will give your friend a shiny new installation.

That's what I thought. I was wondering If their was another way of doing it?

Not really unless you are using a hard drive with the installation files on a separate partition. Laptops usually have this type of set up with an accompanying restore application.

Originally Posted by kemical

Not really unless you are using a hard drive with the installation files on a separate partition. Laptops usually have this type of set up with an accompanying restore application.

Oh okay thanks.

Hi

It's a good idea to make sure your computer is clean when you give it away.

We had a case here that involved a man (someone who worked at the same ad agency I did many years ago) giving his old computer to his church. That was a nice thing to do, what could go wrong with that?

The problem was that when the people at the church went through it, there was stuff left on it that ended up sending him to prison.

But to get to your question, I just do a clean install of Windows as everyone else has said.

There is software that completely erases all data on the drive, something that a format doesn't really do.
But unless your computer is filled with Top Secret information from the CIA you probably don't have to worry about it. LOL

How to Completely Erase a Hard Drive | PCWorld

Mike

Hi

You could plug the drive in question into another functioning pc and from there use the functioning pc to format the drive then use a 3rd party tool that can securely wipe it too such as CCleaner, its generally what I do when having to reinstall windows and wipe my drive

This method works too for wiping unstartable installs too