A utility like that one would be useful if you wanted to 'sterilise' a drive for resale, Banderson, but for reinstalling Windows it's unnecessary. Deleting the existing partition and creating a new one is good enough

I thought I posted this earlier today and now can't find it so here goes again. I have a hijack problem but don't want to go through the regular route to get rid of it because I also have a hard drive that is incredibly cluttered with programs I don't need. I would love to just reinstall windows xp but when I did and told it to overwrite I still discovered later that there are folders in the program files of things that I have downloaded in the past and deleted. These folders (kazaa, wildtangent etc.) are not runnable but still present. I need as much space as I can get. How do I blank out my harddrive and reinstall and get rid of everything. This is not a legal issue so I don't have to meet any standards as far as hiding something. I just don't want window recovering everything.

Thank you so much, this has been a tremedous headache
James

Originally Posted by avee_kothari8

Since you do not want any of the existing data, while installing a fresh copy of windows:
Delete your partitions and create new ones depending on your needs. Also format the partitions.