Posted on 01/05/2014 10:53:23 AM PST by Mean Daddy
Most modern pcs allow booting from a USB device.
Wonder if you can boot and run Diskwipe from the primary disk and then wipe the secondary disk. That would be easier. Just be careful to choose the right disk when you do it. :)
The circuit board will have lead.
Of course if you boot the machine from the disk your going to wipe that disk will be in use..make a bootable floppy, cd, or usb stick with the program on that
My goal is to create a USB boot disk and run Disk Wipe from it, but cannot create a boot disk that will allow it.
Use CopyWipe for Windows. Burn a cd with it then restart the pc and boot to the cd. How to do that depends on your model. Example you press F12 as the pc starts up. See the screenshots of what you will see when it does boot
http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/copywipe.php
At work this is what we use to erase everything on a pc prior giving it away. If you want to instal XP on it again and if you do not have a cd then go to Ebay. There are many for sale.
http://www.ebay.com/bhp/windows-xp-home-edition
If you buy a new pc you can also put Windows 7 on it.
Amazon and Best Buy are selling it online.
If all you want to do is throw it away, then just destroy it.
The IT folks of an outfit I used to work for would remove the hard drive, drive 2 or 3 16d nails into it with a pneumatic nailer, then sell the machine without a hard drive.
A simpler method is take it to the range, or just whack it into little pieces with a hammer.
If you can start up the pc to Windows then install the free MiniTool Partition Wizard 8.1.1 at http://www.partitionwizard.com/
You can resize or delete partitions without removing Windows.
The labs have vats of acid for that purpose. But there are far safer alternatives.
For glass-substrate drives, a hammer and a bit of mania does an excellent job of making the platters unreadable. (Wear safety goggles.)
For metal-substrate drive platters, fine wet-or-dry sandpaper does an excellent job of making data recovery impossible.
And one of the benefits is that you get all those cool fridge magnets.
Drill some holes in the drive. Takes a few seconds.
1. download bootable CD kill disk...
http://killdisk.com/downloadfree.htm
2. Wipe disk
3. Use sledge hammer
Oh forgot...
You may have to change boot order in bios setup...
If you insert the CD before rebooting you system and the system does not boot to the CD, you will have to change the boot order to include CD ROM before the hard drive.
I’ll help you out, free of charge, but only if you put Apple OS in its place!
If you only have 1 partition on the disk, and it is the XP partition you’re trying to delete, but you booted from the partition, you’re trying to wipe out the operating system (XP) that is currently running. When the partition is gone, the whole file system is gone - including currently open files, etc.
You need to boot from some other device.
I had a netbook with Vista on it that I wanted to “wack”. I had a bootable installation DVD of another operating system (CentOS).
I turned the netbook off.
I bought a USB DVD drive, plugged it in.
Turned on the netbook.
When into BIOS Setup (f2 key or f12 key or delete key or something, I forget, but it tells you quickly on the screen after you turn the machine on. You’ve got to be quick.)
Once in BIOS setup (no operating system is running, you’re running code that’s in the chips on the motherboard), I changed the Boot Sequence so it booted first from the USB DVD device. Then I exited the setup, saving my changes.
Upon exiting setup, the machine does a restart.
Lo and behold, it booted from my DVD, and I proceeded to install CentOS onto the netbook’s hard drive, wiping out Vista.
If you want to put XP back, if you had a bootable install disk for XP, or any other OS, for that matter, you can do whatever you want to the hard drive - once you boot NOT from the hard drive, since at that point the OS on the hard drive is not currently running, the OS you boot from off DVD just sees the hard drive as a hard drive which it can do whatever it wants to.
Download a linux live CD (any distro is fine). Open up a terminal and type “sudo su -”; after that, issue “dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/hda bs=1M” (sounds like an older machine so the disk is probably labled hda) just let it run. Once done, issue the same command and that drive will be pretty well wiped.
oh ,then shoot the fuqr. ;)
I always use DBAN (Darick’s Boot and Nuke) if I want EVERYTHING erased. It’s free and works great. Download and then you burn a bootable (linux) disk.
Download a “live” Ubuntu CD and use dd to write all zeros to the drive.
Assuming your hard drive is identified as sda, you would open a terminal and type:
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=1M
” My goal is to wipe out the hard drive and throw it away.”
Unscrew the case and destroy the disk.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.