Delete an HP recovery partition?

[Shafra]

Hi All, I did some googles on this and I am a little confused. Had an HP PC die, good riddance. But I'm pulling stuff out of the PC to reuse for another build, the hard disk is a 250GB Seagate drive which seems decent. I will be installing XP Pro on the system, not the media center that was on it previously.

My question, when I get the new PC together can I use the XP disk to boot into the typical windows menu where you install/repair or partition and wipe the recovery parition, merge it back to 1 single parition, do a clean full format and install my OS?

Hopefully that made sense, if I need to hook it up to another PC first and use kill disk or something I will, but if I can just do the above when the parts arrive and I get everything installed that would be much easier.

 

[eyeCpc]

A clean install on a brand new primary would be the first step once the drive was wiped entirely. Often many simply use a 3rd party drive partitioning program like Partition Magic or the free Linux tool GParted while that tends to run into problems with HP, Dell, Gateway, and other premanufacturered systems.

The XP installer itself may run into problems like that or from the drive already seeing a newer edition preinstalled on it. Then a security tool for wiping drives would be the next step for a clean install to be seen.

Most drive cleaning/data wipe tools are retail while Active KillDisk comes to mind for this being a highly recommend driver eraser. Active@ Kill Disk. Hard Drives Eraser. Free Download.

The HDD Wipe Tool is also a free download at http://www.softspecialist.com/HDD-Wipe-Tool-4624/HDD-Wipe-Tool.htm

 

[C0RR0SIVE]

Killdisk is rather good software, just burn the iso to disk and select the drive and not the partition, then have it wipe the entire drive out, windows should then see the drive as raw allowing you to reformat the full drive... usualy the hp recovery is hidden

 

[eyeCpc]

That's the one drawback besides being a newer edition you would run into simply trying to remove that with just the XP partitioning tool alone. The advantage of running custom builds on the other hand is being able to use PM, Gparted live, or even another free for home use program found lately found at Norton Partition Magic alternative: Freeware for Windows 2000/XP/Vista - FREE EASEUS Partition Manager Home Edition