Reuseing an old hard drive

[elsparko]

Hi there,

I'm sure questions like this get asked all the time so I'm sorry in advance, I'd just like to check first.

I've got a new HDD and installed 7 on it (finally!) and would like to keep my old HDD to use if I nee a bit of extra space. I've already transfered all the files I want from the old one to the new one so I was just planning to format it.

Will this let me use all the space on it? I know formatting doesn't completely erase everything but I assume It just writes over the old unused data, is this right?

I also have a version of ubuntu installed on the old HDD aswell as Vista, will formatting the HDD get rid of these? I've heard ubuntu can be a bit of a pain to get rid of completely.

Thanks

ES

 

[johnb35]

To completely get rid of the data on the drive you would have to delete the existing partitions and then repartition it and format it. I don't use linux so i'm not sure if windows can see a linux partition to delete it. You may have to use a linux tool for that like gparted or something similar maybe.