Erase Hard disk

I hope this is the right part of the forum.

My son has bought a new desktop and has given me his old 3 year old desktop that he used for his work at home and as he is away for three months I have got to clear the hard disk and re-install windows 7 usung the disk that was supplied with the desktop..
Can anyone tell the best way to erase every thing on the hard disk using free software.
I know that reformatting does not get rid of everything.

Ken

Download Ccleaner from this link. http://www.piriform.com/ccleaner It has a feature for wiping all the free space on a drive. In Ccleaner click on Tools on the left side and then click on Drive Wiper on the right side. Now click on what drives you want to wipe the free space on and click on Wipe. It only wipes the free space on the drive, so it's very safe.

No, if you do happen to do a reformat, everything is wiped off the hard drive so that you can format it back into the NTFS filesystem that Windows uses when you install Windows 7 back onto the disk.


@brkkab123 I belive she want's to reinstall Windows 7 which would require a reformat of the hard drive if you want a clean install. Cleaning a hard drive for free space isn't necessarily reformatting your hard drive

If you have a Windows 7 Installation disk, there's a built in option to reformat and install Windows 7 onto the drive. You shouldn't need any program to do it because that's going to be wiped out anyway when you reformat. If you have another partition you want to format or another separate drive plugged into your motherboard, then you can format it using the built in tools that I know are with both Vista and Windows 7 for disk management. But I assume you just have one that you want to reformat completely so you can prepare the hard drive for a clean install of Windows 7 from scratch?

You can do it from the install disk of Windows 7. IF you want to completely wipe the entire drive using a low-level format procedure then go to this link below. It's easy to do and the time-consuming part is waiting for it to finish.

Be sure to Use the Clean All Diskpart Command.

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials...t-command.html

After it's done you can continue on with the Windows 7 installation process. BE SURE you have downloaded all the particular Windows 7 drivers for the model of laptop you'll be installing it on prior to the install and store them on a thumb drive or CD-RW disc.