how to format an hd (completely)?

[dani82]

there's only 1 reason why anyone would want to wipe out all bits of data from there HD, to protect themselves from getting screwed over once the HD is no longer in your possession

in a couples weeks, i'm going to have get my HD replaced (glad i went for the extended warranty), due to bad sectors on a partition; now, i don't want to take the chance if some tech-geek or Maxtor tries to find out what was stored of my HD and decides to call the FBI or MPAA (it's not child pron, so don't even think about; perverts!)

how would i go about doing this? i got the software that came the the HD and partition magic, but will that do it?

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can anybody recommend a program that will detect bad sectors (but doesn't require to scan every damn sector to determine if it's bad or not [hd regenerator])

[jm1647]

There's a nice free program called bcwipe get it here (http://www.jetico.com/) It will overwrite your HDD to US DOD standards. The free version only does HDD the $$ version is for overwriting files.

[dragongodz]

another freeware program is eraser
http://www.heidi.ie/eraser/

[Smile2]

hmm, you can go to your HD manufacturer website, and just get a tools to do a Low Level Format.

[spuddog]

norton system works premier will wipe your drive and also detect bad sectors. I don't know if it will fix them as hdd regenerator claims to. Off topic concerning hhd regenerator i tried it on an external 30gig and it took three days to run. Is that normal?

[dani82]

probably... yeah

that why i'd asked for better program to detect bad sectors

[theReal]

hmm, you can go to your HD manufacturer website, and just get a tools to do a Low Level Format. AFAIK low level format is not that good for your HD (the manufacturers' softwares always warn you not to use low level formatting unless you are having real problems with your HDD because it might otherwise shorten the lifespan of a perfectly good HDD). Better get some of the software mentioned above that will overwrite all sectors for multiple times.

[Joe Fenton]

If you're running BSD/linux, just use dd to write /dev/zero to the harddrive base device (like /dev/hda for example). Just pull up a terminal and enter "man dd" if you're not familiar with the syntax.

[dani82]

@theReal

that is good to know; 1 month before the "extended" warranty expires, i'm going to run it 'til it breaks