Wipe hard drive from BIOS?

kookooshortman55

kookooshortman55

New Member
I was wondering if there was any way to wipe a hard drive without actually logging on and booting the OS. Both are IDE drives, about 6 year old computers. One's my Dad's, OS won't boot because of virus problems. The other computer I found in my local school district junkyard. Still works and everything, but on startup it asks for the network login credentials. I want to just wipe the hard drives and reinstall the operating systems, the only problem is I can't get in them. Any suggestions?
 
Well, you typically reformat the hard drive whenever you install a fresh OS. No reason to wipe it and then wipe it again when you install.

Although there are various programs you can boot from CD/USB to wipe/partition a hard drive. GParted is a good one.
 
kookooshortman55 said:
I was wondering if there was any way to wipe a hard drive without actually logging on and booting the OS. Both are IDE drives, about 6 year old computers. One's my Dad's, OS won't boot because of virus problems. The other computer I found in my local school district junkyard. Still works and everything, but on startup it asks for the network login credentials. I want to just wipe the hard drives and reinstall the operating systems, the only problem is I can't get in them. Any suggestions?
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You cant be booted into Windows and format it anyway. You boot to your OS CD/DVD. If its just one partition on each drive, just format the partition and install.
 
PohTayToez said:
Well, you typically reformat the hard drive whenever you install a fresh OS. No reason to wipe it and then wipe it again when you install.
Click to expand...

What do you mean by that? I only plan on wiping the drives once to let me use them. It's just that my Dad's hard drive is completely useless now and I want to just reformat it and start fresh on it. The school computers are locked, so I figured it would be best to just wipe those too.
 
When you install an OS, you get a choice whether you want to use one of the partition or if you want to reformat.
 
Did not know that. I have yet to do a complete build, so I've never had to install an OS before. I have a couple XP restore disks that came with the computers. I suppose those would work just as well? If not, now I have 2 options.
 
Those restore disks will only work and would only be legal on the computers they came with.
 
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