How do I erase all data

[bigj1985]

Hey guys this is the situation. I have a seagate Barracuda 7200.12 1TB HDD and it has Win 7 on it. However I njust changed motherboards and I wanna do a fresh install of Windows to avoid any errors. I still have the old install and drivers from the old board on my HDD. What is the easiest way to erase the entire old install along with the old drivers?? Any help would be appreiated thank you

 

[gtvr]

fdisk / format / reinstall
Windows
Windows

(tune of camptown races)

or is there anything on the drive you want to keep?

 

[bigj1985]

nope there is nothing I wanna keep can you explain to me in a little more depth kinda like a step by step?Lol. I know I amsorry I have never needed to reformat or erase a drive b4 and this is not an OEM pc. Thank you for your help.

 

[gtvr]

when you do the win 7 install, you will have the opportunity to select a partition to install on. There's also the opportunity to delete the existing partition, then create a new one

http://pcsupport.about.com/od/operatingsystems/ss/windows-7-clean-install-part-1_11.htm

http://pcsupport.about.com/lr/windows_7_clean_installs/584836/1/

if those aren't enough, google it & there's plenty of guides out there

 

[Paperdoc]

At the very beginning of using your Win 7 Install disk, look for the option to Delete any and all Partitions that already exist on this HDD unit. Once that's done, don't bother to manually Create a new Partition, etc., etc. All the Partitioning and Formatting you need will be done as part of the normal Install process on the (recently-emptied) HDD.

 

[Paperdoc]

IMPORTANT "By the way" note. All the advice above assumes you don't want ANYTHING saved on that HDD, so doing things this way will destroy not only your OS, but also all the installed apps and data files. If that is not what you want, you will need to make a full backup of the unit before proceeding., then do a restore afterward. The trick will be to restore without overwriting the new Windows Install.