How do you completely erase a hard drive?

Use to get rid of overlays and get disk back to factory specs.

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CAUTION: Use this at your own risk (desperation). It will totally erase your harddrive, with no way to restore.

DOS boot disk with at least Debug, Fdisk, and Format on it (Win98 Emergency Boot Disk has it all).
Boot to A: prompt - type DEBUG. a "-" will appear, start typing, and hit <enter> after each line.

The x's are for reference only, do not type. The rest of "Address" will appear on it's own.

Addresses What you type
--------- -------------
F 200 L1000 0 (ZEROS)
A CS:100
xxxx:0100 MOV AX,0301
xxxx:0103 MOV BX,0200
xxxx:0106 MOV CX,0001
xxxx:0109 MOV DX,0080
xxxx:010C INT 13
xxxx:010E INT 20
xxxx:0110 <ENTER> (Just hit enter key)
G
Q


The "G" means GO, and it should give a message like "program terminated normally" (This is from the original instructions, it may be too fast to read on new systems).
The "Q" means Quit, and should return you to the A: prompt.
Note: if you try to access the hard drive at this time, you should get a "Drive not ready" error. Re-boot the DOS disk, partition and format the usual way.
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<<<<<<<<<Remember - proceed at your own risk>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>