Trying to erase hard drives, but floppy drive is broken

C

casilda

New Member
Is there any hope for me? From what I've read so far, the only way to erase the whole drive is to use eraserD.exe, copying it to a floppy and booting from that. The other method sounded like you needed to install the drive on another system because the operating system files cannot be accessed while it is running (this is not of course needed if the operating system if not installed on the drive, but I think mine is). I don't have another system I can install the drives into. (I have a newer laptop, but I'm assuming there's no room for an additional drive, and I don't want to open it up anyway.)

I'm selling my laptop for parts and just want to get any sensitive data off the drives. I have two partitions (C & D), and Windows is on C:. My operating system is Windows 98 SE. I do have a working CD-ROM (read only), and I could use the newer laptop to get eraserD.exe onto a CD. I could boot from that, right? One potential complication is that the newer laptop has Windows XP, so it will require a different version of Eraser than I had to install on the old one (I had to install 5.87 Beta 1 because the regular version was only compatible with Windows 98, not Windows 98 SE.). I assume eraserD.exe is different for each version? Is there a way I could download just the eraserD.exe file to a CD on my newer laptop without installing the whole program on that laptop?

Any suggestions would be great. Thanks in advance!
 
Hi casilda

I think DBAN would be more suitable for your needs. You can make a bootable CD with DBAN.

Be aware though everything will be overwritten when using DBAN !!!!
 
OK, You are the BEST. It worked. Not without some trouble, but at least my frustration w/ finishing this task is OVER, and the guy is coming tomorrow to pick up my old laptop, w/ its clean disk, and giving me $50!

Really, I've been at this for a week, learning the issues about deleted files not really being deleted, downloading several different programs that didn't work for one reason or another...aaagggghhhhh!!! And now it's DONE.

THANK YOU!!!!!

Cheers.
 
You’re welcome ! :D

I hope that now you know how the operating system deletes files you will continue to use Eraser.
 
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