[austeros]

my roommate wants to completely start over on his dull pc, with win 2k and hes going to reformat in dos, but how do you actually zero the drive?

needless to say, ive already given him a hard time since its sooo easy on our side. but hes ignorant, go figure.

tia

[fireside]

you launch microsoft word and try to do something

[Zimmerman]

You boot to your restore or install cd by pressing F9 while/before the machine posts. You should be given a list of bootable disks. Pick the one you want (the CD). Do what you need to get to the disks directory. Type in fdisk/C or D as the boot drive is usually C, in this case the CD-ROM, so the main hdd would be moved to D:. It may be a variation on this since I'm describing the process for XP Pro.

[sniffer]

You can zero it completely in bios. But that's rarely needed, if ever. I had a hard time reinitialising a drive on my friends XP box with diskpart which was a pain in the arse. Thought normally XP should plug and pray it by it self, but it didn't.
Just run the XP or 2k install disk and wipe out everything with the installer.

[ThinkInsane]

I once zeroed a PC hard drive with a giant magnet. Worked like a charm. It never booted again, but all the data was gone.

[benb]

Hm. Pardon my ignoracnce, but I believe that going through the normal Win2K setup (boot from the CD) will do it to. Just delete all partitions and then start the install. If it doesn't zero the drive then Microsoft is crap, because it will take about 20 minutes to format a 40GB drive, compared to the 30 seconds using fdisk in DOS.

[Zimmerman]

Originally posted by benb:
Hm. Pardon my ignoracnce, but I believe that going through the normal Win2K setup (boot from the CD) will do it to. Just delete all partitions and then start the install. If it doesn't zero the drive then Microsoft is crap, because it will take about 20 minutes to format a 40GB drive, compared to the 30 seconds using fdisk in DOS.

When you do the 30 second thing, all you are doing is deleting the files that tell the hard drive where everything is at on the hard drive platter; the information is still there. In fact, that information can still be retrieved using the correct hardware and software. This is what Drivesavers is all about, and why governments have a seven pass zeroing process when hard drives in secured (top secret!) computers are retired.

[austeros]

guess the fun will begin tomorrow with the f/disk method.

he just wants to be damn sure theres no virus or other assorted crap left.

thanks again

[Xeo]

Originally posted by austeros:
he just wants to be damn sure theres no virus or other assorted crap left.

Zeroing the drive won't do that any more than a regular format will. So the reasoning is pointless. Zeroing is one way you can check over your hard drive though. Since it has to write to the entire thing, any problems with it will show up.

[shabbasuraj]

bring it to the NMR imaging centre of your local university...

or junkyard crane magnet...