my hard drive is an old 20 gig hd that is making my computer very slow just from all the old ms files and things like that. a year ago when i talked to gateway about it they toldme to just do the system restoration and it will deleat everything...but it didn't. it there a way to compleatly delete the HD as if it was a brand new one?
clearing harddrive
- Thread starter davo
- Start date
On a drive that old and small you could easily use Active Killdisk to perform a complete "wipe" of the drive by seeing it filled with binary "0s". The term for that is zero filling. If you have a cd writer and not a large amount of data you could easily burn the files to be saved onto cd-r or copy onto a cd-rw(rewritable). Once you have saved the intended files the rest will depend on the OS you plan to run on it.
With XP the installer itself has tools for creating and formatting a new primary partition on the drive. You can also delete an existing partition with the installer as well. First you may want to clean off the drive completely IF you can restore the original recovery partition put on it by Gateway. That will have the backed up drivers and softwares for the complete build hidden there. Active Killdisk goes on a floppy and is found free at http://www.download.com/3000-2092-10188745.html
With XP the installer itself has tools for creating and formatting a new primary partition on the drive. You can also delete an existing partition with the installer as well. First you may want to clean off the drive completely IF you can restore the original recovery partition put on it by Gateway. That will have the backed up drivers and softwares for the complete build hidden there. Active Killdisk goes on a floppy and is found free at http://www.download.com/3000-2092-10188745.html