Any techies in the building, part 3
Posted: Thu Nov 02, 2006 9:21 am
Is it possible to reformat or wipe clean a hard drive without the aid of an OS? I've got a disk I'd like to restore but haven't the foggiest about how to go about it.
<waves> Me; me; I know; over here; me; me!
You could do this with a partitioning tool. I've just had good fun with GParted when I set up my HD for Linux. You could prolly do the same with other such things, like Partition Magic, etc.
With GParted, you download the program (you want the 'LiveCD' version), and then burn it onto a CD. The program will run from CD, without the need for any OS (GParted seems to be a stripped-down bit of Linux, so I guess it comes with its own OS). Note that when you burn the CD, you are burning an 'image', not a file (I don't know what the difference is either), so you need a burning program that can deal with '.iso' images. CD BurnerXP does the job, and is free (go File/Write Disc From ISO File).
Preliminaries:
1) Be absolutely certain it's OK to wipe the hard disk entirely (I know it's obvious, but I had an extemely painful experience of losing data once.)
2) To run the program from CD, you need to set your BIOS so that it will look for a CD before it looks for anything on your HD. If you're not sure about this bit, check back here.
3) If you use GParted, it asks you for a few setup perameters. but these are pretty straight forward - IIRC, language, and keyboard type (qwerty UK map), are about the only ones you need to select anything other than what it suggests.
4) GParted won't actually commit anything to your disk until you click on the 'Apply' button, so don't worry about messing things up before then - at worst just re-boot the computer.