Wipe Windows 7 hard drive

[marklittle]

I'm trying to find a program that will wipe clean my windows 7 hard drive enough where I would be able to install windows xp fresh install. Previously I formatted and partitioned my windows 7 drive but it would not allow me to do a fresh install of windows xp for some reason. I'm guessing that there was some info still on the drive from the manufacture (Emachines) that is preventing me from installing windows xp. My question for the board is: Would DBAN wipe the drive good enough for me to partition and install windows xp? Thanks for any info

 

[DavidHB]

The answer is yes, if (and these days it's a significant if), DBAN (which, in effect, contains its own OS), can work with the hardware on your machine. DBAN, unfortunately, is not currently supported, and has not been updated for some years.

The partitioning may not be the issue with your install; I'd think about drivers as well. Hard drives are a particular issue. All modern hard drives are SATA, and Windows XP, out of the box, will not install on a SATA drive, but needs separate SATA drivers for your chipset, which it expects to be on a floppy (!). Likewise, Windows default drivers may work to get you going, but you will need a full set of XP drivers for your machine (or failing that, your chipset(s)); the Windows 7 drivers won't work.

If DBAN won't work, and partitioning is your problem, I'd suggest that you need bootable partitioning software for your drive. But before you go down that route, do make sure that you have the driver issue sorted.

David

 

[jackjack]

I'm trying to find a program that will wipe clean my windows 7 hard drive enough where I would be able to install windows xp fresh install.

Windows Vista and above have a new and improved long format option (used by default) this will wipe the drive and prevent any data from being recovered (XP and below differed in that a long format only looked for bad blocks).

My Hard Drive Died Ep8 from 55min 30seconds briefly covers it.