Erasing Hard Drives (without Third Party)?

Jun 8, 2011

I have a desktop and have 2 hard drives 1 is running Windows 7 and 1 is running Windows Vista. I would like to completely erase the hard drive so there is no operating system on it (the Vista drive). I would still like to store files on it. I have looked out there on google but I would not like to use third-party software.

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Hard-drives Apparently Corrupted After Attempted To Install A Second Hard Drive?

Oct 8, 2011

make a dualboot comp by adding windows XP to a new partition. I created the new partition with 20gb. (From the 500 of my actual harddrive)But before I actually installed on that, I got distracted with a second harddrive that my dad got(for no reason). It had a full copy of Windows XP backed up on it from another computer, so I figured I would just use that for the dualboot. I plugged it in (wired the same way as my old harddrive, but different data slot), restarted, checked the harddrive in explorer - all the data was there / reading correctly / etc, and I used 'easyBCD' to add the new harddrive to the boot list.(Which, of course, crashes if I try to start it. I just wanted to see what it would do). For a reason I can't remember, I unplugged the second harddrive for a bit, started the computer on accident (I don't know if anything loaded before I shut it off), and then when I plugged it back in.Windows 7 would not launch. It goes to a DOS-like window, except it's just a flashing _ and it never does anything even after a few minutes. XP didn't work still.. so I decided to reinstall XP (as I couldn't tell which harddrive was which on the list, I unplugged the main harddrive while installing onto the new).. and when I did this.. it formatted and installed fully... then restarted.. then restarted.. and restarted.. and just kept restarting, never showing any thing past the manufacturer logo/BIOS load-button-message-thing. So, I then try to use my 3-disk Windows7Recovery disk(burned myself with a program apparently included by the manufacturer.) It installed fully, appearing to work.. but when I launched it, it said "Invalid Partition Table" and wouldn't boot past that. When I insert my driver installer disk, it gives me a basic DOS window thing. dir A: shows the files in the disk. dir B: for some reason shows the same. C: says "Error reading from drive C: DOS area: general failure". All other letter:'s just say "invalid drive". (I'm doing this with both harddrives in.) I attempted connecting the harddrives to an old computer, but it gave an error for both. (It detected the harddrives, but said it had an error reading from it. Windows Explorer asked me to format it... {i'm willing to format one of the drives if anybody thinks it will help, but the old harddrive has data I'd prefer not to lose.} ) Looking on google, I saw several problems that all have similar problems (less overdescripptive than I am though) but none of the fixes suggested worked for me. Also - as I have two different with different errors, I only need to make one of them work.)Also - my other available computer has a CD burner / floppy drive if either are required. I also have several USB's. The computer can boot from USB's and CD's (tested), and I could easily take the floppy thingy and connect it to the computer.also - this computer is probably still under warranty unless unscrewing the hard drive voids it. .. does that count as modification of the computer?

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Mouse Is Erasing Stuff?

Feb 7, 2012

I dont click on it but it erases stuff like moving objects or videos.. you just move it around and it erases white . what is causeing that....this is a mouse that I use with my laptop?

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Erasing Data By Location On Hdd?

Feb 16, 2012

so i have a job coming up that requires carefull erasing of data, i can't scrub the whole hard drive but need to be able to write over the data areas of one single user account location.

now i am wondering is there a way to find out the sector locations for all data on a hard drive for a given user so i can write over those areas to make them as unrecoverable as possible?

i am aware that i am probably asking for something that isn't possible but figured why not ask anyway someone might know of some software that does this.

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Windows 7 Won't Boot After Erasing An Old HD?

Jan 15, 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 Windows 7. I put the Windows 7 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 f 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, I checked. Whats wrong? I erased the old drive so I could install ubuntu on it... I'm guessing since thats the drive the computer came with, I deleted the mbr... I have an external drive with ubuntu I can use to fix this. Before you say to use the windows install disk to fix it, I've already tried that. The repair utility doesn't scan and thus doesn't see my install.

The more I think about it, the more that it seems like its NOT an mbr thing. I think this because of the fact that the windows repair disk doesn't see any installation of windows.The hard drive is not dead. I can read it via ubuntu. Sorry if this thread is hard to understand, I've copied and pasted on multiple forumsHeres the latest: Disabled all other sata's in the bios except the one the drive is plugged to. Now I no longer see sata3 not found or anything.

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Recover A HDD After Erasing The First Sector?

Oct 4, 2012

HDD: ST30005 28AS. Failing. I have to recover some data and throw it away. With Seatools dos cd, I accidentally the first sector. I also set it at that time at 33 gb. Now I can't see any partitions in it. I tried everything in HIREN's boot cd. The drive was failing, 15 minutes at windows loading, SMART messages to backup it, etc. I low level formatted it when it was 33 GB. My data is a few GB beyond anyway. However I played with it I can't read anything from it. Help.OK, so the drive is my third, a storage drive. I disconnected the other drives, inserted the Windows 7 recovery disk, but it didn't do anything. I couldn't find the ol' cmd menu I knew from other times. (Info or help -> a series of commands, including fixmbr.) It found the drive, but couldn't say anything about it. So no access, no identity, no status of it, nothing. Windows keeps telling me to replace the drive, but sees no volume informations. How the hell can a drive become invisible at any kind of content mode? I just used the menu from seatools and it vanished. How can it offer a delete for first sector but no fresh write of it?

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Install Windows After Erasing?

Sep 20, 2012

If I erase my hard drive can I reinstallWindows on that drive.

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Two Hard Drives Same CPU?

Apr 6, 2011

i built me a gaming computer with windows 7, its up and running. I have a old Dell with Windows Xp that i have had for 5 years. I want to put that hard drive in my new computer. is this possible? will there be any conflicts? I want to make it so maybe in bios i can select witch OS to boot up. Or maybe it defaults to Win7 and i can switch to WinXp whenever i wanted.

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Use 2 PC Hard Drives?

May 16, 2011

I've recently purchased a PC with 1 64GB SSD and 1TB HD. Contrary to instructions the seller uploaded everything onto the SSD at C: and not just the OS. He now says I should use a disk partitioner to transfer the files. Also to reset my BIOS.

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Win 7 And 2 Hard Drives

Dec 16, 2009

I currently have a dual boot of Windows Vista Ultimate on one hard drive and Windows 7 RC1 on the other and was planning on

upgrading to Windows 7 ultimate. I have could either upgrade my Vista hard drive which would be easy or I could upgrade the release candidate Windows 7 which is a fresh install on a new drive. Which should I put Windows 7 on?

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How To Use 2 Hard Drives As 1

Feb 5, 2013

If I Format my Hard drives ,do I lose all my systems ,Like Windows???

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Erasing Duplicate Documents And Photos?

Feb 20, 2012

my dad got a new pc and so I rand a back up from his old one to the new with a seagate network hard drive and he returned the old one the problem is that now there are multiple duplicates of his documents and pictures is there a non-risk painless way of getting rid of those duplicates as there are thousands of duplicates?

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Wireless Mouse Is Erasing Webpages?

Jul 30, 2012

I have window 7 laptop ie 8 and my wirless mouse is eraseing pages like a blackboard.

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Windows 7 Ultimate Erasing Chrome?

Nov 16, 2011

I installed Windows 7 ultimate 64bits and since I use Google chrome, I installed that, with the toolbar, but every time I reboot PC, CHrome is goneOn the toolbar is only IE8...What is going on? On XP this never happened??Can I safely get rid off IE and "keep" Chrome? I am afraid to delete it, or uninstall it cause I might not have a IE at all.

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How To Swap Hard Drives

Jun 3, 2011

I have two laptops that are identical...HP Compaq nw9440. I have a 100gig drive in LAPTOP#1, and a 750gig drive in LAPTOP#2. Both drives are running an identical Windows 7 Enterprise typical install. Can I put the 750gig drive in to LAPTOP#1? Can I create and save an NTBTLOG.txt file from each laptop (I.E. ntbtlog-LP1.txt) and select either one during the boot-up? The reason is LAPTOP#2 is not running very well. It has been dropped and I fear the motherboard may have a crack in it causing random boot problems. Sometimes the laptop doesn't even recognize the hard drive.

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Hard Drives Became Switched

Jul 28, 2009

64installed on c, win 7 later installed an d. dual boot has been working perfectly until

something caused the drives to switch. now win 7 starts ok but looks for all it's files on c, which is locked.

vista starts up fine, and sees all it's files on c as it should.

my windows 7 repair disk, created at start of win 7, does not correct problem, nor does system restore.

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Recycling Old Hard Drives

Dec 23, 2009

After upgrading, I've found that I have 7 IDE hard drives ranging in size from 1 GB (!!!) to 200 GB. I'd like to get rid of them all. Is there a free reliable recylcing service out there. I've already wiped them clean (except for the 1 GB drive which won't spin up. It's from 1994).

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Can't Eject Hard Drives

Nov 7, 2011

Just added this to my computer Safely Remove Hardware Shortcut - Create

and when I try and eject using the right click on the desktop I get

Problem Ejecting XXXXXx USB Device

The 'XXXXXXXXX' device is not removable and cannot be ejected or unplugged

This is when I try any combination of clicking stop on the drive name and drive letter in the window.

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Run Two External Hard Drives?

Jul 10, 2012

I can only run one at a time instead of two. I would like to copy my 1.5tb over to my 2tb so I have a back up.

My laptop only holds 200GB of remaining data so I can't use that hard drive or I would.

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How To Check Hard Drives

Jul 31, 2012

This morning my pc started acting up for some unknown reason. After numberous attempts to fix it, I decided to restore from a restore point. It said it did restore but things got even worse.I then decided to restore an Maxium Reflect image I had made a couple weeks ago. When I made the image, the pc was working fine. The restoring of the image went normally.I have two strange things occurring.

1. I have two hard drives with 3 partitions on each drive. After about 10 minutes I can NOT see second hard drive in either windows explorer or Disk Managaer.

2. When the pc is first booted and a few minutes pass, I get what sounds like a radio station playing. It only lasts for about 20-30 seconds then goes off. It comes back randoms times. I have checked the processes that are running and nothing stands out that would cause this.I built this PC in 2009 and the combination of these identical hard drives (1 TB Sata) have always acted strange at times. Example the second hard drive would NOT always boot when windows booted. This was usually fixed by just rebooting.I have checked and all fans are working normally and inside the case is relatively clean.Is there any software that can be used to check hard drives???

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Switching Hard Drives?

Oct 5, 2010

I blow away a computer so I'm taking the Hard Drive out and putting it into another computer. From a AMD 3000 to a AMD 3800 and all it does in re-boot. I put in the XP CD and tried to do a repair but it didn't work or I didn't do it right.

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Hard Drives And Booting

Oct 21, 2009

I have a slight issue that I'm not sure how to fix. It's nothing serious but it's something I'd like to take care of.

Basically, I bought a new hard drive, made it the primary drive, and kept the old one in so I could transfer everything over to the new one and keep the old as my backup drive.

I installed Windows 7 but when I boot my machine without the disc in the drive it wont boot. I made my old drive the primary one again and I discovered that when I installed Windows 7 it put the boot information on the old hard drive instead of the new one.

Basically, I'm looking for an easy way to get it to boot from the new hard drive without having to use the old one as the primary. Any ideas?

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2 Hard Drives Seen As One C Drive?

Feb 4, 2010

I have a laptop that came with Windows 7 home premium and one hard drive. I purchased a second hard drive and installed. Is there anyway to set this up, even if it means wiping everything and reinstalling, so that both hard drives are seen as one C drive? My laptop does not have a RAID option in the BIOS. What about if it was Windows 7 professional?

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Get More Performance From Your Hard Drives

Dec 15, 2009

If you think that switching to the high performance power plan is enough to set your computer to the best plan, well, it isnt.

Heres how to set your hard drives so they are included in the high performance:

1. open control panel

2. type power in the search bar and click "change power-saving settings"

3. to the right of the plan name click "change plan settings"

4. Click "change advanced power settings"

5. Go to the hard disk section and then "turn off hard disk after"

6. Enter 0 (zero) in the box (this will change to never)

Doing this prevents your disks from being "turned off".

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WEI Score - Hard Drives

Dec 24, 2009

As my hard disk, I have a 1TB Western Digital Caviar Black Edition.. it's 7200RPM, 32MB cache. Yet, WEI only gives it a score of 5.9. Everything else on my PC is a 7.0 or above.. any reason for that?

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Run Software Through Hard Drives?

Apr 5, 2012

Can I install software/programs onto my external Hard drive and run them through my laptop as normal?

I have lots and lots of adobe products and heaps of music and movie editing software. I dont use them everyday but play around often.

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Can't See Hard Drives In My Computer

Nov 1, 2009

i can't see the hard drives in my computer

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Why Does Toshiba Have A C AND D Hard Drives

Jan 21, 2012

why does Toshiba have a C AND D hard drives. Other computers I have had only have 1 C hard drive

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Install Same Os In Different Hard Drives?

Jan 29, 2012

Can we install same OS in different hard drives?

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Hard Drives Disappeared

Jan 20, 2010

Any trick on how to get windows7 to keep seeing your slave drives?

I have tried un-sleeping, increased time to 999min. All drives have drive letters & are listed as active and healthy etc. Each have mix of ide but mostly sata drives. Windows have been updated.

I have a small office with 8 computers trying to run Windows 7 now. All fresh installs onto new sata drives @ 2 weeks now. (The old xp drives was just turned off awaiting reformat). Everyone is starting to have the same problem with drives that disappears. On some of the computers it happens as quickly as in 5 min, sometimes right as you moving one file on one drive over to another drive. Nothing but rebooting all day.

Any clues?

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Switch Between 2 Hard Drives?

Sep 1, 2012

I have Win 7 desktop with 2 hard drives. One small SSD I use for work only and it only contains few work-related programs. The second larger HDD has a cloned bootable copy of SSD (in case of failure of SSD I would be able to continue working) but also has other non-work related stuff (pictures, videos, games....).

I was wondering how to set up the system so that I get a choice of which drive to boot from every time I turn on the system. That way I could choose which drive to access depending on whether I need to work or play.

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