- last post: 01.01.0001 12:00 AM PDT
There's a couple of ways to wipe your hard drives clean. One is to type format C: into the command prompt. The other, more advisable way, is to totally reinstall windows (I'll describe using XP). When you're reinstalling, you have the option of what partition to use - delete all the existing ones and then when prompted whether or not to format, make sure you format it the long way. Not only will this wipe your drive clean, but it will also let you know if there are any serious errors on your drive.
This happened to me - I had to reformat, and when I did I found that I had some serious errors on the drive and windows would not install. So I wound up creating a partition from the first 45 GB of my 60 GB Hard Drive (since the error wasn't detected until later in the formatting process). This worked fine, but I often wonder if I couldn't have opted to lose less of my storage and still have gotten away with it.