I have a WD SATA laptop hard drive, 250GB and would like to completely wipe the drive. This means the boot sector/MBR/whatever as well, in addition to the normal storage space. How do I go about doing this?
Insert your O/S disc into your drive. Restart your computer and instead of booting up to your HDD, boot up from the O/S disc. When the O/S setup loads, look for the format option.
I second what scorps said, plus a comment - probably, you would want to choose any formatting option that is not labeled as "quick", because that won't really wipe everything, just the filesystem information and that leaves actual data on the disk.
No offence, but in my first post I stated boot sector in addition to storage space in which case a simple reformat was obviously not what I was looking for. Googled around, what I was actually looking for is something called disk reinitialization or the less correct term, Low Level Format.
Low Level formatting doesn't exist anymore. It was used until a long time ago to specify the sector structure on the hard drive. It's not even possible to perform a low-level format on newer hard drives that use IDE or SATA connections. A tool like Acronis Disk Director should be able to wipe your entire drive.
