How do you wipe your HD?

[liamcrane]

hi everyone just wanted to no if anyone can help me out, im looking to wipe my whole HD but just want to keep windows on it thats all, just wondered what the best way of doing this is maybe a 3rd party software would do the trick?

many thanks

 

[95thrifles]

youre best doing a fresh install of windows tbh, that will make sure everything is removed from registry etc and you'll end up with a much faster system

 

[liamcrane]

im doing it for a friend and they dont have the OS disks to reinstall, all they are doing is giving it to a friend so just wanna keep xp installed and remove all personal data, i have heard dban is meant to be quite good tho might give that a try

 

[Lanz]

I think dban wipes everything, there's no option for keeping OS files intact.

You could manualy clean off all the documents and personal data, ghost (image) the OS onto DVD or another disk. Then dban the disk and copy the OS back onto the clean disk.

 

[~Divine~Wind~]

Baby wipes seem to work fine, gets rid of all the dust nicely

 

[J.B]

If there is a license key attached you could try and track down the CDs from someone else and install using the license attached to the PC.

 

[TheMorningStar]

as above clean install. download a disk copy its legal, use existing key on the sticker obviously

 

[Derek W]

I think dban wipes everything, there's no option for keeping OS files intact.

yeah dban wipes everything. I used it on my old pc before chucking it so no one in foreign lands who get used uk pcs could find any info to impersonate me

 

[liamcrane]

o right cool i have an oem windows xp disk would i be able to use that for a fresh install on his machine if i use his xp key? by reinstalling the OS does it really wipe most of the stuff on your HD?

 

[DaveF]

o right cool i have an oem windows xp disk would i be able to use that for a fresh install on his machine if i use his xp key? by reinstalling the OS does it really wipe most of the stuff on your HD?

Reinstalling doesn't actively wipe anything (AFAIK), but there won't be any simple way of accessing what was there before. For a very loose analogy, imagine you took a book, ripped all the pages out, and stuck them back in random order. Nothing is actually wiped, but you can't easily read the book any more.

But continuing the analogy, if you had a credit card number on one of those pages, it wouldn't be too hard to find it with a bit of perseverance.

So if you're paranoid, I would run DBAN first to wipe everything, then reinstall Windows.

Darik's Boot and Nuke: "It's the only way to be sure".