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How do you completely wipe a hard drive with command prompt or MS DOS?
Wiki User
∙ 12y ago
Well, there are several ways:
Getting Rid of the Data Physically and Destructively
One, if you don't need the hard drive after the "wipe," is to hammer a nail or two through the unplugged drive, rendering it unreadable to all but the most dedicated data recovery team. If you have an extremely powerful magnet, you could run that over the drive a couple times, too.
Starting Over With a Hard Drive
If you are simply trying to start over with your hard drive, you can use Windows' built-in formatter to erase and reformat the drive. In "My Computer," right-click the drive, select format, use all of the default settings (save for the label of the drive), and hit "Format." This will not work if the hard drive you are trying to wipe is your only or main hard drive, though, and is not completely secure for those of you who are trying to purge data permanently and securely.
If it is your main hard drive, then you can simply reinstall Windows or any other operating system on your computer. This is done by popping in the recovery CD's or installation CD's that most likely came with your computer. Doing this will wipe all data and start you off anew, though the nature of the reinstallation means that this method is about as secure as the previous method (read: not very secure).
Wiping Sensitive Data
One last option, for those of you who want to wipe your drive securely and do not want to reinstall Windows, is to use a third-party program to erase your hard drive for you. The technique that these programs use is to write a large file to your hard drive over and over again to get rid of any residual stored data. These programs will probably cost money, and should really only be used by those who are either selling their current hard drive, and want sensitive data off, or those who really need to remove all traces of their files. To find a program capable of this, Google "Hard Drive Eraser" or "Secure Hard Drive Delete."
One could possibly do the same thing for free by deleting all of the sensitive files by reformatting, reinstalling the OS, or just deleting them in Explorer, and then writing large files to the hard drive until it fills up. This method would rewrite all of the hard drive, and render all of the data almost completely unreadable.
I hope this was helpful. Good Luck!
Wiki User
∙ 15y ago
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When your windows XP starts it goes into a command prompt and you can't log on it lets me choose to delete hard-drive or go to command prompt hard-drive won't delete cause of an unknown error please?
If you have a CD to restore the operating system it's a right time to use it. It looks like your PC registry was damaged which is incurable or some of system files were damaged to deleted. In the second case the restoring CD will help. Boot from the CD in the restore mode (command line mode) and try to restore the system.
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If I were going to format and could'nt i would just buy a larger hard drive and replace the old one
When setting windows 7 when should hard drive be partition?
Always should the drive be partitioned. As NTFS for Windows 7. You can edit partitions while installing Windows through the installation menu or command prompt, or in diskmanager after the operating system is installed.
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it checks for errors or defects on your hard drive and tells the computer not to write there anymore
How do you change hard drive settings to accept more than 4gb of file at a time?
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What is the command prompt to completely wipe and reformat a hard drive that already has XP installed?
AnswerThe easiest way is with a startup disk made from a windows earlier,switch from a:/ to c:/ than type c:/format c/q.this will do a quick format." However, a quick format leaves most all the data on the hard drive for anyone with the right utilities to look at. To completely wipe your drive, you need to use the CIPHER command with the /w wipe option. The wipe option will overwrite all unallocated space with 0s, 1s and then random numbers three times.Run the format command first, since CIPHER only works on unallocated space (helping you make sure you don't accidentally erase something you intended to keep).After you have reformatted the disk in question, open the command prompt and type: cipher /w:[DRIVE LETTER]:\So if you are wiping your "E" drive, it would look something like this:C:\> cipher /w:e:\If you have a version of Windows that does not include Cipher (like XP Home edition), you may be able to get it from the Microsoft site.
