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General discussion

Hard Drive Wipe. PLEASE HELP

Mar 12, 2005 4:24AM PST

hello.
my friend gave me a old hard drive for use in a computer i just built. What my friend did not tell me was there was so many viruses on the hard drive that it would not start. Is there a way I can wipe the hard drive while in bios? Keep in mind that i cannot get into windows.
-thanks

Discussion is locked

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Or..
Mar 12, 2005 4:43AM PST

Boot a write protected diskette with DOS and KILLDISK.

Bob

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DOS
Mar 13, 2005 1:58PM PST

Real DOS disks are kinda hard to get these days. Do you have any friends running old Windows 95, 98 or Me? Get him/her to make a installation boot disk for you.

Well, I guess it's really the same thing.

Another thing that you can do is go into the BIOS and set first startup disk to CD-ROM. You can start a installation with Windows XP CD. Before acutally installing the OS, it'll allow you format the harddisk. Once format is complete, quit installation. At that point, nothing is written yet, so the harddisk will remain blank. This is actually better than using DOS floppy because it allows formatting in not only FAT, but also NTFS, which DOS can't do.

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Interesting. What is over at...
Mar 13, 2005 8:39PM PST
http://www.bootdisk.com ?

I get the .exe, run it and I have a DOS boot disk. I add killdisk to it and I have what I need.

Please tell us what you need?

Hint: Killdisk and Delpart do not respect NTFS so it is clear you didn't try these.

Bob