Erase Your Hard Drive

Do you want to erase your hard drive , or simply partition / repartiton. Many people get confused about partitioning a hard drive or erasing. If you want to make sure that it’s much harder for anyone to recover any data or you would like to divide your hard drive into 2 or more partitions then you’ll be looking to repartition.

Formatting or erasing your hard drive, does not actually delete any data it just enables it to be over written, which is why many applications are able to recover data even if a hard drive has been erased / formatted

Whatever your needs I would always still partition a hard drive, and then format afterwards, simply for peace of mind. If you simply want to partition your hard drive to create more partitions there are a number of packages on the market to help with this such as Partition magic, but unless you want to resize live partitions then this is not for you. If you do make sure you’ve backed up your vital data files prior to this.

If you have a single hard drive setup you’ll need to be able to erase or wipe your hard drive from a boot disk such as a Windows XP, 2000 or Vista boot CD, please note this is not the same as the system restore CD.
A genuine Windows Operating system CD will enable you to boot from this and then as you go to install the software follow the prompts through to either Format / erase or partition your hard drive.

I could go into more detail here but once you boot from the CD it really is very easy to follow.
If you have a dual disk setup or you want a dual disk setup once you’ve added the secondary disk you need to prepare it for use, simply right click on my computer, select manage, under the storage section choose Disk Management, Look for Disk 1 right click on it, now create the partition and format, if you choose fast format it will only take a few seconds to complete. Now from either my computer or Windows explorer you should see you new hard drive.

As a tip when you erase your hard drive always choose NTFS or New Technology File System as the format, it’s offers much more security and better data compression that other older formats such as FAT32

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we hope you enjoyed our erase your hard drive article, but if you need a hard installing checkout our hard drive install guide.

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