ERASE all Partitions... Great tool

[Hman_Korea]

Ok, I just posted on the applications forum... trying to find out what fdisk is called in XP, since I can't find it...

What I do is boot to the A: with a win98 or ME boot disc... Then use that fdisk to wipe out all my partitions... Works Great, but Had a friend who bought a new drive for a slave and he wanted to simply put his music on this new drive then wipe out the old drive running windows 2000 and do a clean instal of XP... I tried to walk him through the 98/fdisk thing on the phone, but he couldn't find his 98 boot disc... Ok... He used the software that came with the drive... EZBIOS... and it completely killed Windows 2000... So, I stopped by his house, Put in my 98 boot disc, and it shows 2 partitions... 1 primary and one Extended dos partition...

Primary was easy to kill but the extended partition would not delete... It originally showed up as fat16 but at later attempts was called "unknown system"... Well this little tool worked great... it took 10 seconds on a 40 Gig hard drive to make it new again... "clearhdd.exe" Some of you might need this so here it is... Boot to the floppy so you have an A: put this in and type "A:/clearhdd.exe" Your old bogged down hard drive will be low level formatted and you will be able to let XP do the NTFS or Fat 32 format...

you will have to unzip it on the floppy before you get to the command prompt... (I don't want anyone to forget that)
Good Luck..

 

[Qumahlin]

Originally posted by Hman_Korea
type "A:/clearhdd.exe" Your old bogged down hard drive will be low level formatted and you will be able to let XP do the NTFS or Fat 32 format...

You said it took 10 seconds on a 40 gig drive...if thats true then it was not a low level format. A low level format is when a disk is physically formatted and the interleave factor is set..which takes alot longer then 10 seconds no matter what the program or drive..so it must just be a standard format

 

[Binary]

Well, I always use the NT Tool delpart.exe (www.rustysmith.com/delpart.exe) for stubborn harddrives and that's working fine too. Anyway, Qumahlin is quite right, no way will this perform a low level format on your disk. That would be quite stupid too, because there is no tool that is capable of low level formatting all types of harddrive. You need the utility provided by the manufacturer for that specific type of drive. Otherwise you may well ruin your harddrive forever. And even then, don't do a low level format unless in a desperate attempt to revive an already comatised drive.

 

[Hman_Korea]

Well on the 10 seconds, yea it was that fast, but it removed all the partitions that were there... I was expecting it to take two to three hours, but 10 seconds and it was done... wiped out everything... partitions and all

 

[Binary]

Sure, but my tool will do that in one second (I guess; I never really counted). The point is that it will only remove the information that describe the partitions from the Master Boot Record. With the correct set of tools you will still be able to read data from the disk because it's all still there. Only after repartitioning and reformatting it's no longer possible to retrieve data. Unless you're willing to spend some real dough, but that's more like James Bond stuff. Anyway, no low level in this case. That's for sure.

 

[Hman_Korea]

Thanks A-Lot...

I agree with you... I found out today that it only wipes out the allocation table on the drive which is (if I am not mistaking) the portion of your drive that you seem to lose after a format... You know, a 40 Gig HDD only shows up at around 39 something...

After you all taught me through this site, I think the Windows XP Computer management would have done the trick, Because I think it will even wipe out my Linux Partitions... Hold on, Let me check.. (going to re do linux anyway...) Sorry to make you wait, but yes it will...

Anyway, Thank you XP-erience for the chance to learn more... I will be back regularly... and thank you Binary for your great info...