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Quickest/Easiest Way to Format a Harddrive

N

nageov3t

Lifer
not necessarily for the purposes of hiding data from the CIA and space aliens, but that's quick (less than an hour) and the data won't be accessible via conventional means (ie: point and click).

windows format sorta works, but there's the no OS requirement (I need something bootable via floppy or cd) and ideally, I'd like something that leaves the drive unformatted. partition magic also sorta works, but it doesn't play well with scsi drives or Win 2K/2K3 drives.
 
Get a Linux boot disk.

Tomsrtbt is a Linux rescue floppy. Knoppix is a linux OS on a CD. (a entire operating system that runs from a cdrom, no installed parts on a harddrive)

In linux everything is a file. Each IDE device has a file that is associated with it.
/dev/hda =primary master
/dev/hdb =primary slave
/dev/hdc =secondary master
/dev/hdd =secondary slave

If you have any other ide devices (like on a ide to pci adapter) they get added incrementally on. like /dev/hde /dev/hdf etc etc.

Also scsi devices are like that, but they go:
/dev/sda
/dev/sdb
/dev/sdc
etc etc.

So if you want to wipe the harddrive, and it's set up as the primary master you boot up with a floppy or cdrom and get to a command line.

you type:

dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/hda

And that will fill the drive up with random data and completely wipe out any partitioning information and formatting/data. Basicly leaving the harddrive fresh. If you want to leave it as near factory condition as possible then go:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda

Either way a person can, with any OS, simply and easily go in and partition and format the drive as if it was brand new and never been used.

There are various manufacturers that offer download utilities that you can put on a floppy and do the same things. So if linux scares you then you can go and probably find a utility from your HD's manufacturer. Generally called 'low level format", but they realy aren't. (real low level formats will fry your HD), they just zero-out your drive like the dd command can in linux.
 
If you can get your hands on a windows 98 start-up disk it should what you want.

It can boot your system into dos.

Then use fdisk to check and make partitions
and format c: from the command line to format the drive
 
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