How do I wipe hard drive?

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Jeff - 01 Oct 2004 01:10 GMT

I'm giving away my 6-yer-old Dell computer with Windows
98. I think I've deleted all the personal information
from the hard drive, but I want to be sure. How do I
erase all the data or reformat the hard drive?

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Jeff Richards - 01 Oct 2004 01:18 GMT

You can reformat the drive by booting to a startup floppy and entering the
command
FORMAT C:

Repeat for D, E etc or however many partitions you have.

A slightly more thorough deletion will use ZAP or WIPE from this site:
http://www.microstorage.com/Harddriveinfo.htm

If you are concerned that anyone might actually attempt to retrieve deleted
data, then you need a utility like this:
http://www.thefreecountry.com/security/securedelete.shtml

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Jeff Richards
MS MVP (Windows - Shell/User)

> I'm giving away my 6-yer-old Dell computer with Windows
> 98. I think I've deleted all the personal information
> from the hard drive, but I want to be sure. How do I
> erase all the data or reformat the hard drive?

Reply to this Message