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Freeware for Cleaning Up a Hard Disk?

post #1 of 7
8/1/05 at 2:13pm
Thread Starter 
ANyone know a good program to wipe a HD clean? I am hoping to find a good freeware one.

I heard of one you can buy called kill disk or something like that.

Thanks
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post #2 of 7
8/1/05 at 2:39pm
why don't you just do a format using the windows xp disk...clear the partitions and do a full format of the drive?
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post #3 of 7
8/1/05 at 2:40pm
Thread Starter 

well...

I tried to reformat, but I think I actually installed my XP Pro on top or my old XP OS. It kinda backed up some of my old stuff.

I just want to wipe the whole HD and start over. I have all the drivers I need. BTW, I am doing this on my Desktop PC, Dell Dimension 8100, not my new baby (XPS).

I really don't know exactly what I am doing, but I did the reformat on my XPS just fine, so I figured, how hard could it be.

Plus, this old puter is so fouled up with crap. It is a 40g HD and I cannot get more than 59% of it free. I have defragmented it 20 times I think.

Any help in this matter would be greatly appreciated.

WIll the windows XP Pro disk do the install itself after I have wiped the harddrive? Or what do I have to do to get it started?

You are good people. Thanks for helping me so much!
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post #4 of 7
8/1/05 at 2:40pm
eraser
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post #5 of 7
8/1/05 at 4:05pm
When you reinstall windows, change your bios settings to boot from CD... if you are booting rom your harddrive, you won't be able to reformat the entire drive because the files it needs have been written to the drive itself. Once you set it to boot from the CD instead of the harddrive, you can reformat the entire drive, and then you are set... nothing else to buy.
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post #6 of 7
8/1/05 at 4:15pm
reformatting doesnt erase all data on the disk, it just sort of renames it so the computer thinks nothing is there.

use killdisk (the free version) and then reformat and reinstall windows.
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post #7 of 7
8/1/05 at 11:08pm
dban is best
http://dban.sourceforge.net/
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