formating 3 hard drives

cocker92 · 24 Feb 2009 at 20:34

hi guys im about to sell my pc which consists of 3 hard drives. how do i go about format all the hard drives (which are partitioned) and then installing windows vista onto one of them again

Microwave · 24 Feb 2009 at 20:35

Format the two without your OS on in windows then format the boot hard disk in bios.

Then reinstall windows.

cocker92 · 24 Feb 2009 at 20:40

format the boot hard disk in the bios. can you explain a little bit more. where will i find that bit?

Darkninja462 · 24 Feb 2009 at 20:45

just put vista disk in then format them all

when you go through the set-up process.

Ninja

J.B · 25 Feb 2009 at 00:45

Darkninja462 said:
just put vista disk in then format them all when you go through the set-up process.

Ninja

That, I dont know what he's on about doing it in the BIOS, I've never seen a motherboard with this feature,not to say it doesnt exsist, I just dont think it does.

Put the Vista disk in, make sure your boot priority is set to boot from the DVD drive before the HDD, go through the install process, when it asks you for a hard drive to install, click the advanced options and format the drives.

might be worth mentioning that even though the data wont be visible to average joe,it may still be possible to recover it so if there is anything highly confidential on there you might want to use a data destroyer.

Amnesia · 25 Feb 2009 at 00:51

so many years ago the option used to be there to format hard drives in the bios.....havent seen it in a while though.

Big.Wayne · 25 Feb 2009 at 01:01

cocker92 said:
hi guys im about to sell my pc which consists of 3 hard drives

I would give them a good scrub so all your pr0n, em I mean your data is wiped away!

Active@ KillDisk

ceego · 25 Feb 2009 at 01:02

if these drives are gonna be in the PC when you sell it on i would do a little more than a standard format as information can stil be recovered from them... do a little research with google and find a program that will wipe them properly..

cocker92 · 25 Feb 2009 at 08:15

cheers guys. final question unless you have more tips is......
each hard drive is partitioned. how to i get them back to just their complete partition?

The Deuce · 25 Feb 2009 at 08:20

you can do that in the Vista setup

SirConfused · 25 Feb 2009 at 08:22

If you want to clean your HDD's properly then use DBAN. It's an app that wipes drives and writes random data over the whole disc to make any data completely irrecoverable. Well worth it if you're selling the PC. You can boot the disc, wipe all the drives and then boot the windows installer and go from there.

Big.Wayne · 25 Feb 2009 at 13:46

cocker92 said:
each hard drive is partitioned. how to i get them back to just their complete partition?

KillDisk deletes the partitions, data, everything!.

The Deuce · 25 Feb 2009 at 13:50

cocker92 said:
cheers guys. final question unless you have more tips is......
each hard drive is partitioned. how to i get them back to just their complete partition?

this can also be done in windows i disk managment

cocker92 · 26 Feb 2009 at 08:45

hi guys, iv used killdrive to wipe clean two of the partitions (all expcept my drive with xp)

iv formated the drives in windows xp. they both show up as dynamic volumes and i want to now partition them

i have partition magic 8

can someone help please