wipe all of the hard drive

[free2believe]

I have eraser 5.7. i have a dell. Is there a way to completely erase the hard drive and if i do will my system restore disks reinstall windows?

 

[Robbie]

the program you need is DBAN, which is bundled with Eraser but the version bundled with 5.7 is now a much older version.

DBAN is available to download as a standalone program and can be copied to either floppy disk or burned to a CD (which is how I have used it).

See:

http://dban.sourceforge.net/

for the program, and

http://www.snugserver.com/phpbb2/viewforum.php?f=6

for the DBAN support forum.

As for reinstalling, well I have recovery disks that do reformat and reinstall both the System recovery partition then reinstalls all of Windows XP (making the computer look as though it has just been shipped from the factory - of course I then have ro reinstall all Windows updates and things like Firefox etc etc).

Try posting in that forum if you are unsure, as I can't really advise you whether your disks would reinstall everything (using DBAN on the hard drive destroys ALL data and ALL partitions if you so choose).