Erase Hard Drive And Reinstall Windows 7?
Jul 15, 2010
I intend to sell my computer soon, but before doing so I'd like to clear the hard drive and remove all my personal data. I've done a bit of research on the topic and found a few programs (DBAN, Eraser) that seem to do this. I'm not exactly sure which program is best though, or what exactly they do. I would also like to reinstall Windows 7 after erasing the hard drive. However, my copy of Windows 7 is an upgrade from the computer's original OS, Windows Vista. The computer didn't come with any system recovery or OS install disks so I'm not sure how to boot and install and OS after erasing everything. Will I be able to just put in the Windows 7 upgrade disk and install it? (I can't imagine it could be that simple, but who knows!) I do kind of remember a "clean install option" when I upgraded - would that be the same as clearing the hard drive and reinstalling?
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Mar 8, 2011
How I can delete everything off of my hard drive so I can reinstall windows 7?
Specs:
AMD Phenom II x2 550
MSI 870A-G55
MSI Hawk ATI HD 5770
Antec TP-550 550w PSU
WD Cavier Black 750GB
Lite-On DVD Burner
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Jan 20, 2013
I have a dell dimension 9100. I have two drives on it, a ~160gb drive that came with it with xp, and a 500gb drive with win7. I put the win7 in myself and had been using that. Finally, I decided to erase the old drive with xp on to install linux on it. After erasing the old drive, my computer won't start up. It says it cant find sata 1 or 3. I've tried switching the cables hooking up to it but that doesn't help. If I push continue after it tells me how it can't find them, it says 'loading pbr for descriptor 2...done' and stays there. I did not erase windows 7,
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Apr 19, 2012
i was wondering if anyone has any programs they could recommend to use to wipe a hard drive clean before reinstalling windows 7, I noticed you have this CCleaner 3 link on here CCleaner - Download.com If i put that on a disk and started it up as i would to reinstall can that wipe the disk clean?
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Nov 18, 2012
I am trying to completely erase everything from my hard drive (windows are not installed on that hard drive). So is everything deleted by going to the hard drive and right click -> format? or does this do what a regular Windows 7 format does? I mean to completely erase all hidden files that can be restored and such.
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Oct 23, 2012
I want to reinstall windows from an image.I want to do this because I re-installed windows on a new samsung 830 256gb ssd but I didn't use secure erase before doing so.After the install my random write speed went down to 330ish MBs when i was at 400 MBs before. My current win 7 install is optimized and works fine; only my random write speeds have decreased and it's bugging me lol. Do you think a secure erase and reinstall would improve my write speed?
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Jun 30, 2011
I can't recover or install a fresh copy, error !disk is write protected or not enabled in bios ! i have checked and double checked , i can not find no password or any thing in the properties
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Apr 12, 2012
The hard drive on my Toshiba Satellite crashed. I made the backup discs when the computer was new, but evidently made them through the Toshiba backup rather than Windows backup. Now my recovery discs want to access the hard drive partition to reinstall Windows 7 which it cannot do.
How can I install the Windows 7 OS onto my new hard drive? I have the product code on the back of my computer, but how can I get Windows 7 to install without having to purchase it again?
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Feb 7, 2011
I have 2 hard drives, an SSD for my OS, and a 2nd drive that I store all my files on. I had to do a reinstall this morning, and since I understand Windows 7 has issues installing sometimes when there's 2 discs connected, I disconnected the power and sata cable from my 2nd drive. So I install Windows 7, and it goes fine. I turn off the computer, plug the 2nd drive back in, turn the computer on and see the drive letter, but when I click on it, I get a message "You need to format the disc before you use it". I go into disc management and it's listed there as well, but the File System is listed as Raw.
Since Windows 7 only takes 15 minutes to install on the SSD I use, I decided to install it once again but leaving the 2nd drive connected this time. My BIOS recognizes that the disc is there, as does windows. It's just telling me it's in RAW right now, and I have no clue how that happened. Oddly enough I even made an UBUNTU disc and booted to that...but from UBUNTU that 2nd drive doesn't even show up, it only recognizes the existence of my primary hard drive.
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Nov 7, 2011
I want to leave my Hard Drive Like NEW
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Oct 3, 2011
I am trying to help a friend out with his Sony Vaio E Series Laptop. The computer had crashed and he tried to do a clean install of windows but it failed and nothing would respond. Even when you tired to do a clean install of windows again it just went to the light blue windows screen with the bird and nothing happened. So I used Dban to Wipe the hard drive clean and start over from scratch. After I wiped it I tried to reinstall windows and it says there are no signed device drivers found. So I checked the bios and it's not even registering the hard drive. I have been searching the boards everywhere to find a solution to this. The Bios does not allow for much change so I can not make sure it is set to a SATA connection and I have tried turning off the signed device option when starting up. Nothing is working.
Sony Vaio E Series
Model# VPCEB23FM
Intel Core I3
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Jul 8, 2010
I am planning on building myself a new computer and I am using the same hard drive as I am currently and I wanted to reinstall win 7 and clear my hard drive to have a new start as my hard drive is currently full of junk .So I was wondering if I reinstall win 7 on the same hard drive will the copy still work or will I have to buy a new license/serial key.
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May 8, 2011
I am trying to format my hard drive and reinstall windows 7 as my hard drive is running out of memory tried removing some programs but is not doing much my hard drive is 232GB I only have 28GB left, how to format my hard drive.
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Jan 6, 2012
After formatting hard drive to reinstall windows 7 its saying missing boot?
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Jul 19, 2012
I need to know how to wipe/format the hard drive to be able to re-install Windows 7 as 32bit.
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Jul 19, 2012
how to wipe/format the hard drive to be able to re-install Windows 7 as 32bit.
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Mar 3, 2009
i just installed windows 7 on my computer and now i have only 11 GB HHD left out of 80 GB...
is there anyway i could reinstall it??? and if i reinstall it can i still use my product key. i already activated it, so am i going to have a problem re-activating again?
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Jan 27, 2012
It's time to format my hard drive. It hasn't been formatted since 2008 when it was bought and it's having some major issues.I made a system image. when i was installing it, I couldn't check the option to "get rid of the partitions and format the hd". It requested the drivers, asked me to insert the disc, but I don't have any disc with the drivers
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Oct 21, 2012
I recently did away with Windows Vista and went to Windows 7. I did a total backup to an external hard drive and now I am trying to retrieve the backed up files pertaining to my windows mail and I am currently using Microsoft Outlook located in Microsoft Office 2010. How do I locate and transfer to current windows mail system and what kind of file extension do I look for?
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Feb 27, 2011
how do i format my c drive
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Dec 5, 2011
I have a failed hard drive that I'd like to send back to get replaced but obviously want all my data wiped first. The problem is that the drive has failed so miserably that it won't even mount to any system in order to perform any sort of wiping. I've connected it to my system directly, via a USB to IDE adapter, and via an eSATA adapter in both Windows and Linux to no avail. Sometimes it will show up in the Device Manager under Hard Drives, but that's as far as it gets - it's never assigned a letter and doesn't show up in Disk Manager. It doesn't show up in Ubuntu when I perform an fdisk either so I can't perform a DD.
This is a bit of a catch 22 as the hard drive has failed to the point where it can't be read, but I'm not sure what measures are going to be employed to attempt to validate and read the data at the manufacturer when they test it for failure. If the drive all of a sudden starts working, there is too much personal data on there for me to just hope doesn't turn up.
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Apr 4, 2012
A buggy drive management tool erased my SECOND (not boot) hard drive's MBR and replaced it with a completely bogus and useless GPT.My actual partitions should be intact, and I am optimistic that partition recovery tools would be able to find them and restore the original partition table. However, they won't work, as long as the drive is identified as a GPT disk
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Nov 14, 2012
I have a hard drive I want to backup to a 64gb flash drive and then restore it to another different hard drive than where it came from. I have windows 7 and office on my laptop and I want it on my desktop pc. There isn't close to 64gb of info on my laptop so it should be fine even though the hard drive says I have 160gb. It is all free space except for those programs.
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Oct 25, 2011
So, I have a i7 2600K system with a solid state disk as the boot drive, and an older (c2008) Samsung Spinpoint F3 500GB drive as the data drive for programs (that I deem as not worthy of the quick load times). The hard drive has given me some errors over time, and I bought a hard disk to replace it (a Hitachi 1TB). The issue I'm having is that the fact that Windows 7 puts a small (100MB) partition on the F3, and for some reason, even though I'm running Acronis 2012, it doesn't seem to be able to clone the F3 over to the Hitachi. I've also tried Drive XML, and for my 2 hour wait, I only managed to acquire a boot error. Thankfully, I've not done anything rash to destroy the data on the F3, but given the fact that I've seen corrupted files in Steam from that drive, I'm not will to trust it long term with my data. I really need to get the data onto that Hitachi, though... Anyone have any advice for upgrading the HDD in a SSD/HDD system? I don't really feel like it should be so hard, especially if I've bought Acronis True Image, but maybe they haven't designed their product to handle this scenario quite yet?
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Jan 15, 2012
my computer has a cd[dvd drive built in and the hardwear isn't being detected how do I reinstall it the trouble shooter says to try reinstalling it help please
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Sep 2, 2012
i have installed windows 7 OEM on a 3.5 sata hard drive,if i add a SSD hard drive to my system can i use my OEM copy of windows without any issues?
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Sep 10, 2010
How I can reinstall my windows on C: drive where is my old files. I dont have enought free space on my HDD's to move away. I wanna remove my old windows and install new windows on same drive but I do not want to lose my old files on C: drive.
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Apr 1, 2012
I have 3 ssd's. 60gb 120gb and 256. Currently the60 is not installed and may still have data on it from a previous pc build. Windows is installed on the 120 right now with the 256 being a second drive for my steam games. I want to erase all data on all of the drives and install windows onto the 60gb (new c drive) and make the 120 and 256 an e and f drive. Here are some of my questions.Should i hookup the 60gb drive so my pc recognizes it and then go about reformatting and erasing all data from the 3 drives? Except the os.Then after erasing all data do i delete the partition from the 120gb drive and reinstall to the 60gb drive?Does installing windows to a drive automatically default it to the c drive?
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Oct 17, 2012
I am asking this question since this is my first compter with an SSD primary drive. I have a 120gb ssd primary and a 3TB mechanical split into 2 partitions 1 500gb for apps and the rest is storage. I want to reformat my Windows installtion drive. But what i'm curious about is how is this going to effect the apps i have installed on the mechanical drive. Will this cause issues with windows references not running the apps properly.
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Jun 16, 2011
I have a HP Touchsmart IQ500. Turning my computer PC on today, all I got was a blue HP invent screen with setup, boot menu, system recovery, and system diagnosis, and I could not get past it. I entered the BIOS and figured out that the hard drive was listed as "not installed." Pretty sure that is the main problem.I tried a system restore (with the Windows 7 install disc), but I guess the computer couldn't read the hard drive enough to enter safe mode (I tried restarting and F8ing several times). I put in an external hard drive, and the BIOS read it; however, windows does not allow you to partition an OS on a hard drive.
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Mar 30, 2012
I have an internal hard disk not in use ,and I would like to make it as external disk !I looked on the net and I found I should have the " encelsure " butt I think I wont find it here in my city .So is there another way ? like usb -esata cable
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