A little help please. I want to clean a hard drive for a friend so she can start from scratch. The comp was from a business that upgraded. HP/compaq with XP pro, Pentium 4 etc. I downloaded Kilzdisk as a boot_cd_iso zipped to clean completly. Question is, do I really need to wipe everything and reinstall XP pro? should I just repartition or reinstall over the top and would that be enough. I don't know how to repartition. I'm going to go buy a bottle of wine and check for answers when I get back. Then I'll try not to ruin this unit.
To start from scratch, you'll need to reformat the hard drive. Unless you want to set your own partitions different from the way its formatted already then you won't need to reformat. If you haven't already formatted/damaged the installation, you can use the program here to find your current XP product id which was used to install on that computer. Write it down. Then you can use an XP pro disc (doesn't have to be original as long as you have a valid product id code). Put the cd in, reboot and you should boot from the CD to the XP installation. The installer will give you the option to reformat the HD, choose NTFS as the file system and continue. Once its done, carry on with the installation. After the command line installation, it will reboot and go to a GUI based installation mode. Its here it asks you for your product id, type in the code you wrote down and carry on with installation. I strongly recommend you get a copy of XP Service Pack 2 on cd and install it before you go online with the computer to get some security.
During the XP setup, if you want to do multiple partitions, you can simply delete the partition(s) then create a new one with all or part of the hard drive space. Later, you can go back in disk management (right click 'My Computer'--->Properties) and create more partitions as you see fit. Better to use NTFS instead of FAT32. Of course, BACK UP before fiddling with your drives. Data recovery isn't cheap, especially if they are able to do this (if they can't, most places won't charge you, and if they do, it'd be inexpensive---but still not something you want to have to deal with).
You don't need to use that utility. Just use the format as [filesystem] option during the windows install, and you won't even notice a difference. All data will more or less be gone, and you have a fresh windows install. Good luck.
