Re-using an old hard drive, Best ways to clear it out.

J_D

J_D

New Member
A family member has recently bought a laptop that has rendered the oldest PC in the house obsolete and I have been asked to see if we can salvage any parts from it to upgrade the other desktop PC that they wish to keep. The only part in the Older PC that is re-usable is the one HDD BTW it’s a PATA, which is the same as the one in the other PC, we wish to add it too as a secondary HDD.

Just to make it clear:

Computer1: New Laptop has made computer3 obsolete.
Computer2: The better spec of the two computers has one HDD which is currently partitioned. (Using Win Xp)
Computer3: the oldest PC running Win2000, want to use its HDD in Computer2, no data needs to be retained from computer3. So a straight forward wipe, to remove data and partitions is all that is required.

All the cables in the Newer Desktop are there such as the power cable and the secondary IDE ribbon connector, and I assume I would have to change the jumper to slave.

However here’s the thing I would really prefer to have this hard drive wiped before it goes in the newer desktop, to prevent any conflicts. How can this be done.

Also both desktops have partitions, once the newer desktop has this second HDD I would really like to get rid of the partitions as I can not see any benefit if you now have 2 Separate HDD's. how do you remove patitions?

All data that needs to be kept on this older HDD has been backed-up and the operating system on it is not required anymore (Win2000)

Guidance much appreciated

J_D
 
In Computer3 pop in the windows A: boot disk and go to the dos prompt. The do "fdisk" and "format c:" It will clear everything.
 
Turn on your old computer with the slave HD. go to My computer>format. Best way to clear it out.
 
Thanks for the replys, Sadly my uncle doesn't seem to think he has the windows 2000 bootdisc, so doing the dos prompt method, wont work unless it can be done while windows is loaded, or if people think everything will be alright if i bung it in the winXP machine as slave and then do the right click format option, I am assuming that you can't do that method to a master disc that has the loaded operating systm on it?
 
J_D said:
Thanks for the replys, Sadly my uncle doesn't seem to think he has the windows 2000 bootdisc, so doing the dos prompt method, wont work unless it can be done while windows is loaded, or if people think everything will be alright if i bung it in the winXP machine as slave and then do the right click format option, I am assuming that you can't do that method to a master disc that has the loaded operating systm on it?
Click to expand...


If you go to bootdisk.com you can get the win9x disk and do it. The thing is free, and uses the same commands..
 
Well yeah, the right click, format on the new computer would work, it is the easiest way I can think of...
 
Will this just wipe the data in each partition or can i get rid of the partitions as well?
 
I think it wipes out every partition but I'm not sure. Try then if it still have partitions get rid of them. Anyway when you get rid of partitions, you have to format your HD...
 
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