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My sister is giving away her old computer. The data is non-sensitive, however she'd rather give it away empty. The computer is disconnected from the internet, does not have a CD drive anymore and runs Windows XP.

Is there a way to format the system drive regardless (all I found was that it requires the installation disk of XP, which is quite a hassle)?

Why can't I restart in plain old DOS and do a plain old format c: /u?

Abel
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3 Answers3

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You could bring a Linux Live USB stick to the machine, boot off that, run fdisk /dev/sda and delete the partition(s).

That would allow the system to become operational again just by recreating the partition table (which will be easy if there is only one partition). To stop that blank the drive with dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda, or for a faster option just kill the start of each filesystem with dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda1 bs=1024 count=1024, dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda2 bs=1024 count=1024 and so on before wiping the partition table with with fdisk. ls /dev/sd* will tell you what partitions are present on the drive.

Edit: Why can't I restart in plain old DOS and do a plain old format c: /u? - You can if you have an old DOS boot floppy hidden away, but with XP there is no "plain old DOS" to boot to.

David Spillett
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4

Formatting doesn't remove data. Use a software like DBAN.

kinokijuf
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You can do it using USB flash drive.. Two way possible with it:

1st, you can can create a bootable USB flash disc, but it would be tricky i guess.

I'd rather the 2nd way which is copying the windows setup files to a flash disc using another computer, then install recovery console to target pc using flash disc. After that boot to recovery console and format from there...

Check out http://support.microsoft.com/kb/307654/en

Hasan Manzak
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