Foirmat a drive that was a boot drive?

[Pghpooh]

HI
I took a drive out of a pc that was the boot drive. I formatted the drive so I could use it as storage in another pc.

When I formatted the drive did it also remove the boot sectors and partitions???
If not how can I make the drive look like it just came out of the box??
The drive is a pata drive. All my computers now use sata drives. I had a pata drive enclosure I wasn't using and put the drive in it and plugged it into the usb port on my pc.

I have Acronis software (WD version that came with a WD drive) and used it to format the drive and hopefully make it look like a new drive.

Do I have to do anything else?

 

[Rifter]

how long did it take to format?

You want to do a full format not a quick format. It would also be a good idea to zero fill the drive.

 

[Mr. Pedantic]

Yes, it did. It took everything away. So you can just use it. Windows won't see any partitions there, and you won't either. However, if you really want to make the data actually physically disappear instead of just not being visible, I'd suggest you write over it with a zero fill or some other utility that advertises overwriting stuff.

 

[RebateMonger]

Put the disk in the external housing, attach it to a PC, and open up Disk Management. In Disk Management, you can pretty much delete any partition that was on the disk. Then you can create a new partition and re-format the disk.

If you are running Windows 7 or Vista, doing a "full format" of the disk will overwrite the whole partition with "zeroes".

 

[Nothinman]

HI
I took a drive out of a pc that was the boot drive. I formatted the drive so I could use it as storage in another pc.

When I formatted the drive did it also remove the boot sectors and partitions???
If not how can I make the drive look like it just came out of the box??
The drive is a pata drive. All my computers now use sata drives. I had a pata drive enclosure I wasn't using and put the drive in it and plugged it into the usb port on my pc.

I have Acronis software (WD version that came with a WD drive) and used it to format the drive and hopefully make it look like a new drive.

Do I have to do anything else?

Depends on what you mean. If you just formatted one partition then no, it didn't remove any partitions. You have to either manually remove them or use a tool like DBAN to completely wipe the drive.

 

[Yellowbeard]

Depends on what you mean. If you just formatted one partition then no, it didn't remove any partitions. You have to either manually remove them or use a tool like DBAN to completely wipe the drive.

Got a link? An ISO would be great. I have used Parted Magic but have not tried DBAN.

 

[Nothinman]

Got a link? An ISO would be great. I have used Parted Magic but have not tried DBAN.

http://www.dban.org/download

But be careful, I believe that it wipes all disks that it finds by default so it's very easy to accidentally wipe the wrong drive.

 

[mfenn]

Depends on what you mean. If you just formatted one partition then no, it didn't remove any partitions. You have to either manually remove them or use a tool like DBAN to completely wipe the drive.

:thumbsup:

Windows tries to hide information about the exact state of partition table from the user, and confusing situations come up from time to time.

 

[kornphlake]

I recently used a ubuntu 10.04 Live cd to remove partitions and format a drive, or you can download the gparted live iso (http://gparted.sourceforge.net/livecd.php) and use that instead of booting a full linux distro. Gparted will show you any boot information and let you remove those partitions. The hardest part is remembering to set your bios to boot off a CD. It's pretty intuitive, I believe the default in Gparted will be a linux filesystem, you might want to make note and set it to NTFS.

 

[Pghpooh]

Thanks for the info.
It tiik about 30 to 40 minutes to format the drive. (it's a 32 gig)
I will go back to Acronis and do it again then write 0's to the disk.
Found this on the dban site.
" DBAN will automatically and completely delete the contents of any hard disk that it can detect, which makes it an appropriate utility for bulk or emergency data destruction."
BE CAREFUL!!! The site tells you to burn the software to a cd then run it. Looks like it wipes all drives it finds!!!