what is the best way to erase a hard drive of a cpu

[korsjs]

i am going to help someone with a computer problem. their cpu is invested with virius and spyware. it has windows 2000 loaded on it. i want to wipe it clean before reinstalling. what is the easiest way to wipe it clean without taking it out of the machine.

 

[VOOMER]

Format

Put in a Windows 98 boot floppy ,fire it up ,go to a prompt and type in
. fdisk then follow the commands format all ,remove the floppy re-boot to your windows 2000 or whichever it was and do a clean install.
Make sure once you are done you do all windows critical updates.

hope this helps

 

[korsjs]

thank you. i believe i have a 98 boot dish around somewhere.

 

[VOOMER]

You can also boot to the win2K disc and follow through with a new install ,you have to watch closely and select format C: to make sure you get it clean.
If you decide to use the CD option which is generally easier if you havent done this before just use your wits and follow along it will ask you what you want all the way through. Some systems will not Boot to the Cd by default and you may need to go into setup (bios configuration ) to set it to boot to CD.
If you cant get it to boot to that go to the floppy.

 

[charper1]

yep & make sure he/she invests in a copy of norton internet security w/anti-virus and be sure they make the restore disks

 

[VOOMER]

Norton

Yes Charper1 I also am a firm believer in NAV.
Symantec has always found what other software doesnt and usually finds it before any harm.

Highly Reccomended.

 

[korsjs]

i use norton system works on mine and love it. i will be working on it this weekend. her problem is that her son clicks yes on all the "do you accept" and then it installs all the spyware. i ran the windows beta spyware and it found over 100 forms of spyware.

 

[bcshields]

A nice strong magnet will erase that hard drive nice and quick.

 

[LonghornXP]

Since I always tend to f around with beta software and other crap I've decided its best todo the following below. I also like Norton AV products as well along with a good hardware router from Linksys.

Now with all that said I like todo a fresh install of Windows XP Home Edition and download SP2 and all current updates at that time. I do all of this behind my hardware firewall. I install all of my key system drivers and software. Once I have everything I need working the way I like it I use a software program called norton ghost and I do a backup onto an external hard drive and I make a bootable startup CD. This allows me to boot my computer in the ghost recovery console which now requires 256MB of RAM or it won't even run. I select the ghost image on my external hard drive which I only connect to my computer when I need to recover and I have everything to a working state within 10 minutes. Now any AV and Windows updates that came out after the original backup I download and once in a working safe state again I can create a new ghost image with the latest updates at that time.

You have no idea how much time this saves me. Just so you know ghost can backup to blank CDs and DVDs along with any firewire and USB hard drive. What is great about ghost is that your bios doesn't have to support booting from USB or firewire devices because you use the ghost cd which has its own built-in firewire and USB drivers. I'm pretty sure that ghost uses the Windows Pre-Installation Envirement.