Best way to clean up Hard Drive

[nomoreupgrades]

I have just installed a second hard drive in my HP Pavilion and so far all seems to have gone well. Knock on Wood!
I put the new drive in the first bay and all OS and software are residing on it and operating properly. I moved the OLD drive to bay 2 and will use it for storage and to run a couple programs off of it.

My question is what is the best way to clean off the old drive and start fresh with it. It is onboard the computer and shows drive letters H: I: F: & G: with all the programs and os. I would like to end up with it clean and as E: drive. Also, it has a 16 MB cache. Will that stay resident on the drive if it is reformated, initialized or whatever I do or does that have to be reprogramed if it gets removed somehow.

Thanks for any input, Terry

 

[sturm]

If there is nothing on the drive you need, you can use disk management from within windows, delete the partitions, remake one large partition and then format. You can also change the drive letter from there if need be.
Just be sure you are working on the correct drive and not the OS drive.

16 MB cache is resident on the drive itself. Nothing needs to be done with it.

 

[Paperdoc]

Before you wipe everything (and yes, Sturm is right about the process) consider whether it might contain something you need. I don't know about your system. But many complete systems arrive with an OS and a few utilities installed and ready to go on the original HDD. They also have a semi-hidden Partition that contains a backup of this initial installation, to be used to restore from in emergencies. The CD that comes with such systems does not have a full backup of the OS. It has a set of software routines that can do the restore for you FROM the hidden backup on the HDD, and NOT from itself!

So, check whether that is how your system was. Do you need anything from that old HDD, or can you get (maybe you have already) a complete OS backup CD that you can restore from if you need to?

 

[nomoreupgrades]

Thanks guys,

I had a shop replace the old drive and they disc imaged it to install on the new drive then used the restore to reinstall the os. All os files are moved. I did not have a caddy for the second bay at the time or I would have had them complete the project. I got the caddy and installed my old drive, etc.

Thanks for your help, things should go okay but I wanted to reassure myself before I went ahead.

 

[nomoreupgrades]

Best answer selected by nomoreupgrades.

 

[Allnsmth]

Hi,
We can use Active@ KillDisk access hardware directly and erase data using several methods.I think that's nice way to clean up all data from hard disk.