How to zero-out a hard drive?

[Talk2Me]

I want to COMPLETELY wipe Win ME off my hard drive and put on a fresh install of XP Pro. How do I zero out a hard drive? Won't that wipe it TOTALLY clean?
Thanks.

[Budfred]

You can use the utilities from the maker of your hard drive or a number of third party utilities will do the job....

[Talk2Me]

Can you point me to any of the zero-out utilities?
Thanks.

[Budfred]

I found one here, (http://www.pcworld.com/downloads/file_description/0,fid,22920,00.asp) but I saw a couple of others on another thread in the last 24 hours. I can't find it again yet, but I will post back if I do. The problems with the forum makes it hard to navigate tonight.

[Budfred]

I found a few HERE, (http://search.pcworld.com/query.html?qt=wipe+hard+drive&col=down&op0=&fl0=&ty0=w&dt=an&inthe=604800&ady=24&amo=9&ayr=2003&bdy=1&bmo=10&byr=2003&nh=25&rf=0&lk=1&ht=0&qp=&qs=&qc=&pw=463&la=en&qm=0&st=1&rq=0&si=0&ql=a) but I saw a couple of others on another thread in the last 24 hours. I can't find it again yet, but I will post back if I do. The problems with the forum makes it hard to navigate tonight.

[Budfred]

Oops, sorry about that, I didn't think any of those went through since I kept getting the error message...


Hehehe...sucks to be you :D :cool: .....Pete

The links were different so I wasn't sure which was correct, and left two copies in place.

[palkot]

What's the difference between zero-ing a HD and reformatting besides eliminating any chance of recovery? Is just erasing the partitions and formatting inadequate for normal operations, or is this a special case?

[Paul Komski]

Formatting a partition just deletes the old file tables in the partition and then sets up new clean tables; it doesn't touch the data that these tables reference. It's like destroying all the card indexes for a library of books, without going near the books themselves. They stay there after they are "deleted" until new books push them off the shelves. The only thing changed outside the partition itself is a reference to the type of card index (the file system) that the partition is using.

Writing "zeros" (or more likely random patterns) to a drive can be "a quickie" by just rubbing out the MBR and the Partition Tables or a full zeroing, which writes to the whole of the drive; both of these affect structures outside the partitions themselves.

The former will clean up any corruption of the MBR (eg a boot sector virus) and make it appear as if the drive has just come from the factory.

The latter, or a full "zeroing" of the drive, emulates shredding all the data on the HDD (all the referenced and unreferenced books in the library). This can be done to clean up "stuff" but is more generally done to ensure that any private data on the drive cannot be (easily) recovered.

The word "zeroing" is often used for this process but "writing patterns" is a better description - since zero's and ones are not represented by N and S magnets, as such, and a HDD's data is not stored as a simple stream of miniature magnets. Radio-frequency patterns are encoded and decoded instead.

BTW, deleting a partition doesn't overwrite data on that partiton either - all it does is scrub the references in the partition tables/partiton boot sectors.