Reformat Your Old Hard Drive

How many of us had dust-collecting unused hard drives somewhere, I mean, face it. But how many of you thought that that drive might have compromising potential that you need to do something about it...like bashing it with a rock...then your safe and sound and your compromising *files* collection secret is forgotten for all of eternity.

Actually there are other ways you can resort to in order to clean these drives and still have them usable, like, make a donation out of them to someone. It's easy to reformat a hard drive and there are also several ways to do so.

Reformatting your hard drive via a utility software

Most software aside from the Windows pre-built Disk Management utility can be used to do this.

Using the Windows Seven interface

1. Click Start

2. Type in, Computer Management, then hit enter

3. In the left tree, expand storage and click on Disk Management

Under Disk Management, you'll find several options to reformat a disk.

One way of reformatting a hard drive is via using a Bootable OS installer. It gives you an option to reformat a disk drive. There are two selections. Do not choose "quick" reformat as it only does clean the beginning (the table of contents) of your drive and not the entire thing, then it would appear as if the drive is empty but its not.

The third way is to reformat a hard drive using command prompt, but this is rather not for the everyday users, so I suggest you stick with software or utilities.

Another is to run a Disk Clean utility. Some freeware that I know which have this functionality is CCleaner, which can also clean your registry to smoothen how your computer runs, delete temporary files, histories and such. As said above, it has an option to wipe the entire disc.

Note: Your hard drive is just a simple disc with millions of very tiny switches that are electronically set to 1 or 0, the pattern determines your files. By reformatting or wiping the disk you reset these switches to their default so none of your files has any trace left. You can't recover files from a reformatted or wiped hard disk, since it's forever gone! Another thing is that this process takes time, for slower PCs maybe hours, and for really huge Disks maybe half a day or more.

In the end, say, you're very impatient; it's up to you to just bash the hard drive with a rock.