Clean erase of hard drive

[Oldnewbe]

This is my first post, I need help bad. I am building my first computer, and i messed up bad.
everything went well untill i attempted to partition my hard drives ( I have two wd400bb drives ) I wanted to install win98 on on partition and xp pro on the other. And like a fool I didn't follow instructions on PartitionMagic and BootMagic and I have both of my drives so corrupted that i can't load xp pro any more ( at one time i had it installed on both drives ). So to make a long story short How can I renew my hard drives and start anew? Thanks in advance. Ken

 

[alankool]

You want to reformat your drives? If so go to the DOS command prompt and type in FDISK. Then it'll show you what you can do.

 

[ElFenix]

tried repairing XP?

XP's CD is bootable and will format/partition drives from in the setup system

 

[Oldnewbe]

Fdisk won't remove the partitionmagic clutter that is on it. thats where my problem is.

 

[WarmAndSCSI]

Download the Data Lifeguard utils from Western Digital and make the boot diskette and load it onto the fscked-up computer and write 0s (low level format) to both HDDs.

 

[Oldnewbe]

:frown: Some how i have made my hard drive unbootable. Thats why i need to completly erase them.

 

[oldfart]

Download Killdisk, make a floppy and run it. It will low level format the drive.

 

[Oldnewbe]

Thanks, That is what I needed. i ran it on one drive and I am installing win xp pro on it now. If I had looked to Anandtech sooner it would have saved me a lot of frustration.
Thanks again
Ken

 

[Oldnewbe]

I forgot to give credit where credit is due. I used the DataLifeguard that The Unhappy Camper suggested.