Wiping my Hard Drive

[tigerfootball05]

I am thinking of wiping my hard drive to get rid of any unneeded junk that has collected on my computer, but I am not quite sure how to do it. I have 2 hard drives, one of which is partitioned with Windows on one petition and random stuff on the other. My second HD is mostly comprised to media files that I do not want to lose. Is it possible to wipe just one partition on my hard drive? If so, how? Oh, and the partition that I am wanting to wipe is the one that contains my OS so will I have to reinstall my OS? Thanks for any help you can offer!

 

[hmammen]

MAGNETS!!


j/k dont try that


well, actually, you can just wipe one of your drives. you can leave the media one alone. Boot up with your windows XP disk and it will give you option of stuff to do. You should pick format hard drive and then it will ask you to pick a partition. You can pick the partition that has windows an it and it will wipe it. Yes you will have to reinstall windows, but you will see massive gains in performance and speed in your computer.

someone of higher intelligence correct me on my statements, if i am wrong.

 

[sailpog]

hes right thats the way i did it when i had a hard drive full of crap...

 

[Yek]

Yh basicaly power off , press f8 (or whatever your "boot from" menu is) boot from xp disk , follow the instructions , also if the is the first time that machine has been formatted you may loose unsuspecting sound drivers etc so take note of them before hand , good luck!

 

[lalala123]

just put the disk in the disk drive and restart the pc. It should boot from the xp cd by it self.

If it does not then you will have to go into the bios and set the boot order if boot from cd/dvd drive is not enabled.

 

[snypercore]

try using Partition MAgic great app

 

[tigerfootball05]

OK I found my copy of Windows XP Pro, but when I put it in the CD drive I couldn't find any options to reformat a hard drive, but i did try to click Install Windows XP and it said "the version of Windows on your computer is newer than the version on the CD". What should I do? Go into BIOS and change the boot order to check for a CD first and then the Hard Drives? And if I have to do that, will I still be able to keep the data on my other hard drive and the data on the 2nd partition of the hard drive I want to reformat? Thanks for the help so far!

 

[Phantom118]

I partition my drives this way...

DO NOT accually do this.. you have to be skilled with sissors....

 

[tigerfootball05]

anyone else know what I should do?

 

[Ste]

Boot N Nuke
google it.