Formatting a hard drive that's in use.

[Razeus]

i have my main hard drive that contains my Vista OS. I need to blank and reformat the entire drive as I have sold it. How do I do this being that it's the boot drive and in use and contains my Vista? Can I go into DOS? How so?

[Pr3tty F1y]

i have my main hard drive that contains my Vista OS. I need to blank and reformat the entire drive as I have sold it. How do I do this being that it's the boot drive and in use and contains my Vista? Can I go into DOS? How so?

1.) Get a blank CD-R
2.) Boot 'n Nuke

[caveman-jim]

This

also Active KillDisk, and Secure Erase

Note that for any bootable media you will likely have to enter the BIOS and set your SATA controller to Compatible/IDE mode.

Note that the current "Dept. of Defense" method for securely erasing data on hard drives requires the use of a degausser or physical destruction.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NISPOM:

DoD 5220.22-M is sometimes cited as a standard for sanitization to counter data remanence. The NISPOM actually covers the entire field of government-industrial security, of which data sanitization is a very small part (about two paragraphs in a 141 page document).[4] Furthermore, the NISPOM does not actually specify any particular method. Standards for sanitization are left up to the Cognizant Security Authority. The Defense Security Service provides a Clearing and Sanitization Matrix (C&SM) which does specify methods.[5] As of the June 2007 edition of the DSS C&SM, overwriting is no longer acceptable for sanitization of magnetic media; only degaussing or physical destruction is acceptable.

"DSS Clearing & Sanitization Matrix" (PDF).

[Razeus]

1.) Get a blank CD-R
2.) Boot 'n Nuke

now that's awesome. thx!

[TenFour]

My Windows XP installation disk setup lets you do a full format of the drive. Don't know if this is secure enough though.

[caveman-jim]

Absolutely not.