thanks to Bill Gates that wrote DOS disk operating system [one month] these utilities while are constantly upgraded and modified it still persists on all PC. Before window there was D.O.S. Now windows still uses D.O.S. but it is transparent to most people hidden in machine language that the computer understand.
In the Applications folder is a folder called Utilities. In the Utilities folder is Disk Utility. Disk Utility will Erase / Partition / Format a hard drive.
CNET and Major Geeks offer hard drive utilities for download. Seagate, Softpedia and Terabyte Unlimited also offer hard drive utility downloads. PC Support and PC World have lists of the best available utility downloads on the web.
Some common utilities for partitioning hard drives include Disk Management (Windows), Disk Utility (Mac), and GParted (Linux). These utilities allow you to create, resize, delete, and format partitions on your hard drive.
Some hard drive perfomance can be improved through special utilities. Check the manufacture website for such software. I know that Western Digital has software to check and fix your hard drive.
The area on the hard drive that contains a map to all the partition on the drive is called the partition table. That is what partition utilities edit when you add, delete, convert, or resize a partition.
No, it may come with other software such as backup utilities though.
Unix utilities such as dd can create a bit-by-bit image of an entire drive. Commercial disk cloning software may feature the ability to create drive images as well.
In order to reformat (restore to factory settings) you need to do a clean install (using an installation disk) However, I would recommend backing up important documents, if you don't own an external hard drive, I suggest this: http://gdisk.sourceforge.net/
Two commonly used utilities is a program to clean the drive, either Windows inbuilt utility, or a program such a Ccleaner, and to defragment after cleaning.
Open Disk Utility in the Utilities folder within the Applications folder. Select the external disc in the left hand pane and the formatting options on the right. If the external drive is only for use with the Mac select the default Mac OS Extended (Journaled) format.
There are utilities for doing this. If you really, REALLY want it wiped, you can download a CD image called DBAN (Darik's Boot and Nuke) which will completely wipe out all the information on the hard drive. You can set it to run mutiple passes filling up the hard drive with garbage so that even very advanced techniques will not be able to recover anything.
nothing