Hard drive inquiry

[moderate_rock48]

Hey i was just wondering if you could wipe a hard drive clean without clearing the OS and the other essentials. I could manually remove everything but im not well versed in what I should keep and what i shouldnt keep in the program files and such.

[Sphyenx]

yes, with eraser. Google it its a great program, it does its job by over writting files one by one, very useful.

[Thong_Ispector]

I dont know of any program that will clean a hard drive and leave the OS untouched and useable. Eraser will let you erase any file by overwriting each byte but you would need to tell it which files to delete.

The registry contains all sorts of info that I would not consider CLEAN yet you could not erase the registry and have a working OS. In addition there are hidden files and directories that require special treatment just to become viewable...

A better choice would be to use a program like MyDrivers to make an exe of all system drivers... Erase the entire drive then install the basic OS and run the driver exe...

I always create an image of my systems after the OS and drivers are in place so that I can erase everything and easily get back to a clean system.

[moderate_rock48]

yea, that is a smart move by making an image of the OS and drivers b4 putting anything on it. I will be loading windows XP tommorow, could you also elaborate more on how to make image of your OS and drivers thong inspector? But the hard drives i have were given to me so it is hard to know what was originally on them. btw the hard drives i am talking about are not the ones I will be putting windows XP on. thanks, I will also check into that eraser.

[Thong_Ispector]

I use two different programs to image systems.
I use an old copy of Norton Ghost as well as Nero 6 ...
Ghost has always worked well for me but Nero makes a great bootable DVD.

The problem I have with Nero is when you restore to a partition that is a different size than the original. Windows does not read the partition info correctly. I was able to correct the problem using Partition Magic. I made a small change in the partition size and when Partition Magic was done, Windows reported the correct partition information.

My Drivers is good because it will read the drivers currently in use and create an executeable file to reinstall them later. This is usefull when someone brings me a PC and they "Have No Idea" what happened to the installation discs.