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Formatting the hard drive

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QueSpr04

Programmer
Jun 3, 2004
50
US
THis is a real simple question that I have recently forgotten. I am wiping clean some hard drives so that my company can put them up for sale. How do I format the hard drives to where they are completely wiped out. The OS's that are on the machines range from Windows 3.1 to Windows 2000. Please help.
 
Depends on how well protected you want to be. Easiest is to fdisk and remove partitions until the drive has nothing allocated. Drives using this can be recovered.
There is a federal standard that calls for rewriting over everything 7 times to eliminate the possibility of it being recovered by forensic tools.
Somewhere in the middle probably will be your best bet.

The drive manufacturers generally have a zero fill utility that will overwrite everything. Or a destructive diagnostic would do the same thing.

Ed Fair
Give the wrong symptoms, get the wrong solutions.
 
if im not mistaken, isn't there a f(*) key that you can press during the boot up state that can take you to the DOS prompt and from there you can totally wipe the harddrive clean?
 
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