The Best Way to Wipe a Hard Drive Before a New Install
September 1, 2009 Computer Tips And Tricks
It’s always a great idea to completely wipe the hard drive before loading a new Operating System especially if the 
system in question had on many corrupt files.
The format option that is prompted during a Windows installation usually just wipes and masks over the old drive, but does not completely wipe and write “zeros” to the drive.
There are a number of options to completely format a hard drive before reinstalling Windows.
The first thing needed to check is the installation media for the preferred version of Windows.
Once the installation media is present, the user will then need to download and burn a disc with the DBAN program on it.
Darik’s Boot and Nuke (DBAN) is a bootable disc which will wipe completely all hard drives it finds connected to the computer, so it needs to be used with the greatest of care!
Download the latest DBAN iso file. The next step will be to burn the iso file as an image to a blank CD.
Once the CD is burned with DBAN, put it in the drive of the computer that needs to be wiped and boot up the computer.
Follow the onscreen instructions to completely wipe the hard drive.
After the program has completed its process, one should be able to install the desired version of Windows onto the newly cleaned and fresh hard drive!
Good luck!
