Erase a hard drive

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  1. 02-04-2002, 11:44 PM #1
    webraycer
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    Post Erase a hard drive

    I want to completely reset my computer, and I would like to write a program that will write all zero's to my hard drives so that I can be sure they are completely reset. I know a fair amount of c++ and I have visual c++ 6.0, so I know I have the tools to do it I just dont know how. I think I need to use pointers. Any help would be helpful

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  2. 02-05-2002, 02:10 PM #2
    DeadKen
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    Originally posted by webraycer:
    I want to completely reset my computer, and I would like to write a program that will write all zero's to my hard drives so that I can be sure they are completely reset. I know a fair amount of c++ and I have visual c++ 6.0, so I know I have the tools to do it I just dont know how. I think I need to use pointers. Any help would be helpful


    I don't think visual c++ will help much. The task to want to accomplish is at a lower level then a Windows app is normally allowed to run.

    You would probably have to boot to Dos to do a decent job of it. Then you could wipe it out by hand (disk i/o operations).




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  3. 02-05-2002, 03:47 PM #3
    ihafarm
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    First off, if it is an IDE drive DO NOT ATTEMPT TO ZERO IT OUT. You have a 50/50 chance of destroying the drive completely. SCSI drives don't have that problem. On the other side...it is possible to recover data from drives that have been zero'd out. I've heard of machines that can recover from a drive that's been zero'd up to 22 times. You can probably find a utility to do zero a drive on sharware.com.

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  4. 02-05-2002, 03:58 PM #4
    chronicle
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    You should be fine

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  6. 02-06-2002, 12:26 AM #5
    webraycer
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    yea it is ide. Are there other ways to be sure everything is erased from the drive? One drive has been registering as 32 gigs and it is a 40 gig drive. I cant remember when this happened but I think it was the last time i tried to install linux. An extra 8 gigs would be nice. I just want to be sure all the space is freed up.

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  7. 02-07-2002, 07:29 PM #6
    biosx
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    Originally posted by webraycer:
    yea it is ide. Are there other ways to be sure everything is erased from the drive? One drive has been registering as 32 gigs and it is a 40 gig drive. I cant remember when this happened but I think it was the last time i tried to install linux. An extra 8 gigs would be nice. I just want to be sure all the space is freed up.
    A good way is to fdisk the hard drive, and delete all the partitions. Then create a new partition and have it do the max size. That usually fixes any problems with old partitions from other OS's.

    You also have to understand that math (when dealing with bits and bytes) is different. 1G is not necessarily 1,000 bytes. It is actually 1024 bytes. With this converting, the harddrives usually don't show the number that you think your hard drive really is.

    Good luck



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  8. 02-07-2002, 09:38 PM #7
    webraycer
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    I am aware of the byte->gigabyte conversion, but what is strange is that one hard drive is about 38,000 megabytes, and the other about 32,000 megabytes. They are exactly the same. I cant remember for sure, but i think originally they were the same. It seems interesting that the size of one of them is the maximum size for a fat32 partition. Yes, I have tried deleting all partitions (I have done that several times). Actually, there is no partition on that disk as I type this message.

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