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
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?
View 5 Replies View RelatedI 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,
View 4 Replies View Relatedi 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?
View 9 Replies View RelatedI 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.
View 5 Replies View RelatedDose anyone Know to Uninstall Windows 7 from a hard Drive Completely ??
View 14 Replies View RelatedI 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?
View 2 Replies View RelatedI was wondering... If I move my video, music, my documents folders etc. from my boot drive (ie C drive) to say a storage drive (D Drive), is the data completely removed from the boot drive or is it still there waiting to be erased next time a new file is written to it?
View 5 Replies View RelatedI have an HP desktop running windows vista that will soon be passed on to me. If I buy an "Upgrade" version of windows 7, is there a way to completely and totally wipe out the hard drive and upgrade, or would I have to buy the more expensive "full install" version of 7?
View 9 Replies View RelatedI would like to completely wipe the hard drive of my Lenovo Thinkpad as the Best Buy geek squad really messed things up. I need to back up all of my data first and was wondering if there was any free options online? I have a 4GB jump drive I can use as well.As for wiping the laptops hard drive, what is the best way? Keep in mind that I want to have it completely restored to factory state. I don't want to do a simple reformat through a Windows 7 install
View 25 Replies View RelatedI 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
View 6 Replies View RelatedThe 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?
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.
I want to leave my Hard Drive Like NEW
View 2 Replies View RelatedI 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
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.
View 9 Replies View RelatedI 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.
View 9 Replies View RelatedAfter formatting hard drive to reinstall windows 7 its saying missing boot?
View 4 Replies View RelatedI need to know how to wipe/format the hard drive to be able to re-install Windows 7 as 32bit.
View 3 Replies View Relatedhow to wipe/format the hard drive to be able to re-install Windows 7 as 32bit.
View 1 Replies View Relatedi 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?
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
View 12 Replies View RelatedI 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?
View 6 Replies View RelatedI have Windows Vista home premium 32 bit operating system. It is giving me trouble, i.e. slow and freezes frequently. I wanted to upgrade to Window 7.Can I simply get Window 7 upgrade or do I have to reinstall the windows 7 completely. Basically I do not want to loose passwords and other programmes which have been installed on my computer like windows office, router and also other files saved on it.
View 4 Replies View Relatedhow do i format my c drive
View 2 Replies View RelatedI 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.
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
View 5 Replies View RelatedI recently (about 4-5 months ago, so not very recently) upraded my system to Windows 7 64bit from Vista. Ever since then my computer has had issues where it locks up completely (unable to move the mouse, whatever sound was playing at the time loops) and a hard reboot is required in order to bring it back to order.
It usually wasn't a huge problem before, but for some reason it willl now proceed to lock-up within about 30-40 seconds of booting up the computer, after the desktop loads. I tried disconnecting my second hard-drive (I had bought a new one to install Windows 7 on, and kept the old one plugged in) but that didn't make a difference.
It seems to boot fine in safemode, but I have no idea what the problem could be.
System specs:
Operating System: Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit (6.1, Build 7601) Service Pack 1 (7601.win7sp1_gdr.110622-1506)
Processor: AMD Phenom(tm) 9550 Quad-Core Processor (4 CPUs), ~2.2GHz
Memory: 4096MB RAM
Card name: ATI Radeon HD 5800 Series
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.
View 3 Replies View RelatedI'm going to be installing a new SSD into my laptop fairly soon (replacing the current HDD and putting the HDD in my optical drive). I am also upgrading from 7 Professional to 7 Enterprise, and with this comes many, many questions.First of all, how would I go about installing an OS onto a completely blank drive? I have experience with system partitioning and installing a second OS, but never onto a clean slate. Would I use a SATA-USB cable and install the OS through that, or would I have to burn the ISO onto a CD and install through my optical drive once I installed the SSD? Secondly, would I be able to use a system backup of my Professional system to restore my programs and files to the Enterprise filesystem? Or would I have to install everything from scratch?
View 4 Replies View RelatedSo, 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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