Software to completely reformat hard drive

[HoustonGuy]

I need to completely reformat a laptop hard drive and reload from scratch, but I can't find the software to do this at boot up.

Anyone have a free source for Format.exe? I have an XP Home CD but it isn't detected at boot up.

I need to reformat the HD and reload the OS from CD. (Not a floppy.)

Thanks

 

[MasterRacker]

Set your laptop's BIOS to enable booting from CD. Boot from the XP CD and the setup will give you the ability to reformat. If you really want to start from scratch, you could delete the partition(s), recreate then format. All this can be done from the XP setup program.

Jeff
[small][purple]It's never too early to begin preparing for [/purple]International Talk Like a Pirate Day
"The software I buy sucks, The software I write sucks. It's time to give up and have a beer..." - Me[/small]

 

[goombawaho]

If your CD is not detected at boot up, there are three likely causes.

1. Boot order not set for CD-ROM as FIRST boot device
2. Bad CD-ROM drive
3. Bad CD

Investigate in that order.

Format.exe is not going to help you get your system reloaded. If you were just trying to WIPE the drive and not worry about reloading with the operating system, get the Ultimate Boot CD for Widows - it comes with DBAN on it. Of course, you'd still face the problems of #1 and #2 above.

http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/

 

[Sympology]

or DBAN on it's own.

http://www.dban.org/

Robert Wilensky:
We've all heard that a million monkeys banging on a million typewriters will eventually reproduce the entire works of Shakespeare. Now, thanks to the Internet, we know this is not true.

 

[fisheromacse]

+1 for Sympology

DBAN, download, burn and be careful what you run it on because it will be blank.

 

[goombawaho]

I never knew it came as a bootable CD.

 

[strongm]

Or hdderase, also known as Secure Erase:

http://cmrr.ucsd.edu/people/Hughes/SecureErase.shtml

- you'd have to build your own bootable CD from it, though (or the more user-hostile hdparam commandline utility)

The ATA Secure-Erase command (which hdderase uses) is rated by the NSA and NIST as more secure than any of the block overwrite utilities. And it is faster (in my experience, anyway). And it works with SSDs, which none of the block overwrite methods do

 

[cdogg]

I've always used CopyWipe which is a free utility that offers a lot of secure wiping options:

http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/copywipe.php

It also comes bundled as an app on the Ultimate Boot CD:

http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/

~cdogg
"All generalizations are false, including this one." - Mark Twain
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[goombawaho]

Where is the original poster? Come back good buddy.