• That’s what Leo should have mention is Erase a hard drive using a Boot-Up Hard Drive Erasing Software (like Active Killdisk, etc etc.), erase it Guttmann method, then erase it with other methods, then when your done you erase with One Pass Zeros so it looks like you never erased, or written data.
• The only downside is that it is a Windows app, so you have to run it from within an already existing operating system, whereas the other two mentioned above can be booted to using a CD or floppy disk. And since it’s a Windows app, it can really only erase hard drives that are Windows formatted (NTFS, FAT32, FAT, etc).
• Wiping a hard drive is also helpful when your PC is infected by a virus. This wipe can also be to remove redundant data on the disk to free up space. On Windows, there are two options to wipe a hard drive. First one is to use Windows 10’s native tools to wipe the hard drive. The alternative to this to use third party tools for wiping such as.

1. How To Completely Erase Your Hard Drive
2. Erase My Hard Drive Windows Vista
3. How To Erase Hard Drive Windows Vista
4. Erase Hard Drive Downloads
5. Erase Hard Drive On Vista

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This hard drive data eraser software will start to wipe all data from Windows 10/8/7/Vista/XP hard drive now. And the wiped data cannot be recovered by any data recovery programs any more. Your private data is safe. Erasing your hard drive before you give it away is important. Exactly how thorough an erase you need depends on your data and level of paranoia. I would like to clear off/erase all of the programs on my hard drive and clean it up before I donate my computer to a worthy cause. What’s the best.

I want to format my laptop. It has Windows XP with service pack 2 installed. I don’t recall getting a Windows CD, so first how do I format and second can I do it without that setup CD?

The answer for most people is simple: no, you cannot. In fact, you should not if you don’t have the Windows setup CD.

Yes, yes, it can be done without the setup CD, but I’m guessing you won’t like what you end up with. Not at all.

Let’s be clear on exactly what it means to “reformat” a machine.

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Let’s be really, really clear.

Reformatting a machine begins by erasing everything on it.

Got that? Everything. The operating system, all your programs, and all your data. Everything. Gone.

I’m sorry if that seems obvious to many of you, but trust me it’s not at all obvious to many others.

So before we even get to step 1, “step 0” is to make sure that reformatting is exactly what you want to do. That means that either you’ve backed up everything you need to save off of the machine, or that you’re ready to reload the machine, or you really do want an unbootable empty hard drive.

•

When most people talk about “reformatting” a machine, they really mean “reformat and reinstall”. It’s a two step process. Step 1 is simple, step 2 typically takes a long time.

Step 1: Reformat

Formatting a disk is a process that simply prepares it for use by writing what is effectively “blank data” to the entire disk. The result is that the disk is ready for use. Empty, but ready for use.

“Re”-formatting a disk is simply repeating that process on a disk that was already formatted. It can be a relatively quick way to erase the contents of the disk to start over, or to write to the entire disk to locate and compensate for any physical defects on the media.

“

My recommended approach to reformatting a Hard Disk Drive [HDD]

'>hard disk for most people is to boot from your Windows install CD, and indicate that you want a new, clean install. I recently did exactly this on my old laptop, and went so far as to use the partition'>partition manager that is part of Windows setup to delete all the partitions on the laptop’s hard drive and create a new partition that encompassed the entire disk. Windows Setup’s next step was to perform a full format of the hard drive before it continued.

If you don’t have a Windows install CD, there are still approaches to get the reformat done. You could boot from one of the many Linux

'>Linux Live CDs and use the tools therein, or boot from some of the boot disks available at bootdisk.com. In the later case you should be able to use the familiar “Format” command directly; since you didn’t boot from the hard drive it won’t be “in use” when you run the command.

After reformatting you’ll have an empty hard disk. Which then brings us to our next step:

Step 2: Reinstall

This is where not having your Windows install CD really hurts. Without a disk to reinstall from, you can’t reinstall! Your only options are to install a different operating system (such as one of the free Linux’s) or turn your machine off.

Or purchase a Windows CD. (If Windows came preinstalled, you might check with your vendor for a CD – it’s unlikely that they’ll give you one, but perhaps they’ll have a discount or other solution for you.)

One lesson here is to always get a copy of Windows on CD when you purchase a machine with Windows preinstalled.

Assuming you have the Windows CD, the remaining steps are simple to describe, but time-consuming to actually perform:

• Reinstall Windows. If you used Windows setup to reformat your machine as described above you’re already on your way.
• Reinstall and reconfigure all the applications you use. I’ve focussed on having the Windows CD, but the same actually applies to the setup CDs for any software on your machine. Make sure you have them or can download the applications in order to reinstall them at this point. All of them.
• Reinstall your data or other customizations. You did backup
  A backup is nothing more than an additional copy of data, ideally kept in a different location than the original. If there’s only one copy of something – say a photograph on a mobile phone – then it’s not backed up.
  (Click on the term for full definition.)
  '>backup your data, right? This is where you copy that data back to your freshly reformatted machine.

How To Completely Erase Your Hard Drive

That’s all there is to it.

Erase My Hard Drive Windows Vista

As I said, I did it recently, and it took about a half day to get my laptop reformatted and then up and running again with a fresh and fully up-to-date Windows, updated drivers, security software, and some of the basic applications I want for its new intended purpose. A full reformat and reinstall of my “primary” machine typically takes most of a day to get to basic functionality, and then I find myself installing missing applications off and on for days.

How To Erase Hard Drive Windows Vista

As you can see, a reformat and reinstall is an extreme step. Make sure you really want to do it before you take the plunge.

An Alternative: A “Non-Destructive” Format

As I mentioned, one of the functions of a full format of a hard drive is to write to the entire hard disk and identify and possibly compensate for bad sectors or areas on the hard drive that have errors. What’s called “low-level” formatting does this quite literally by writing data to the disk and trapping any areas on the disk for which the writes fail. The side effect, of course, is that any data that was there previously is overwritten and lost and you end up with a blank hard disk.

Erase Hard Drive Downloads

If you’re reformatting in order to deal with possible errors on your hard disk, there is another approach: SpinRite.

SpinRite is a data recovery tool that, in a sense, performs a non-destructive low-level format of the hard disk. It reads the existing data from the drive, performs its write tests and “formatting”, and then replaces the data. When SpinRite is done, everything on your hard drive is as it was when you started except that bad sectors have been identified and removed from use, and quite often the drive appears to run faster.

SpinRite is called a “data recovery tool” because if you have bad sectors on your hard drive, it’ll do everything in it’s power to recover the data before performing its other operations. The net result is that data thought lost to hard disk errors can frequently be recovered as the drive is processed by SpinRite.

Erase Hard Drive On Vista

SpinRite is not free, but if you’re facing data loss it could easily be a bargain.