Want to erase everything off my hard drive without recovery cd

#1 Pentazoid

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Posted 04 October 2011 - 01:57 PM

I already have everything that was on my hard drive backed up on an external hard drive and so I want to go ahead and format my hard drive without a windows recovery cd because I don't have access to one. I intend to install a ubuntu OS on my hard drive . This message comes up when I attempt to launch my 320 gb harddrive:

Quote

windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt windows root system hal.dll. Please re-install a copy of the fall above.

. I couldn't install my hard drive containing the windows vista OS on my T43 ibm thinkpad laptop because of the 2010 error anyway, but I was told that the hard drive would be able to work effectively on my thinkpad laptop if everything was reformatted on my hard drive. How would I format my hard drive without a recovery cd?

#2 Pentazoid

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Posted 04 October 2011 - 05:03 PM

please help.

#3 scurvychef

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Posted 04 October 2011 - 05:32 PM

If you are trying to TOTALLY ERASE your HD then you may want to consider Hirens Boot Disk. It includes Dariks Boot and Nuke which will do the job of disintegrating all traces o f your old OS. You can get it here: http://www.hirensbootcd.org/download/

You can download Dariks by itself but I suggest you go for the Hirens, It has Memtest86 and some more nifty tools. It is a good disk to keep on hand.

After you burn the image as an .iso boot from the disk and select darik's boot and nuke. when prompted type: autonuke and let it run all night. It will do 3 swipes of deleting your HD data. with a disk of your size this could take days! so you may feel the need to stop it at anytime after the first pass. If you are thorough and are willing to wait 2 days or so you can run three passes. I have found 1 or two is sufficient and it will not harm your PC to stop it before the 3rd pass is complete.

Good luck!

#4 hamluis

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Posted 04 October 2011 - 05:53 PM

Just an FYI item...

Grinler, on 15 July 2010 - 07:04 PM, said:

THere is a new policy in effect for all staff members. Unfortunately due to legal and liability issues we will no longer be able to recommend OTLPE and Hiren to help people repair their computer. This is because these programs are ready-made WinPE environments that contains copyrighted files. According to Microsoft EULA these types of ready-made images are considered a license violation.

I spoke to a IP lawyer today and was told that our recommending of these tools, even though we are not hosting them, could cause us to have secondary liability for the copyright infringement. Ultimately it makes the site liable.

To protect our staff and the site, I am not allowing these types of tools to be recommended here.

Thanks

Larry

No need to suggest Hiren's when Darik's is the utility that will do the job described.

Louis

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