Starting with a clean Hard Drive

Cool website here, glad I ran across it, looks like hours of good reading dumped in here!

Just thought I'd make a quick post to offer up some information relavent to a couple post's I see closed in here like...

"MediaDirect Resintallation CD for E1705?"

and

"Reformat and Reinstall XP on Dell Laptops"

I'm kind of old school myself, go back into the days when you use to do an actual "Low Level Format" on the old hard drives.

The Windows FORMAT utility you use to be able to run by booting into DOS from a floppy disk in reality did very little to clean up your hard drive for a fresh start, even if you also ran FDISK /MBR which rewrites only the first 446 bytes of the Master Boot Record (MBR), you could still run into problems and still, after going through all this trouble to do a fresh clean Operating System install, not be as fresh and clean as you thought you were. The command may clean up a boot sector only virus, but other types of viri a system could be infected with may have offset your partition tables and pointers.

Other areas where you run into problems and might want to do a clean install is if you tried to install a second Operating System and make your system dual or multi bootable only to discover the majority of your hardware (especially when it comes to laptops) isn't going to run under the second OS you thought you'd install. This then makes a real mess in the hard drive in those dark corners where the average user doesn't see, particularly in the Master Boot Record amongst other places if you've formated portions of the drive under both OS's.

There's anti virus software out there as well that really writes it's self deep into your system and even after an uninstall of the program many of it's problems still remain. Poorly written anti virus software (and even some of the well written stuff) can in many ways be worse for your system and it's performance than if you had a virus it was intended to protect you from. I doubt they've changed much, but McAfee use to be one of the worse out there in regaurds to slowing your performance down, making a general mess out of things and being close to impossible to ever actually uninstall.

For the most part though, your often better off searching and reading for possible easy fixes to problems your having, or just uninstalling the bloatware or junk programs forced upon you with a new laptop or PC, then running a registry cleaning tool to attempt to remove most of the remains rather than going through the trouble of doing a complete reinstall of the Operating System.

So what if a junk registry key or file remains unused on your system some where, it's not even eating up enough space on your drive that even when removed you'll notice any savings of available space. Uninstall utilities should really do a better job at uninstalling these programs, but they don't they likely never will.

For those times when you do want to start with a clean slate though, if your going to waste the time to do it, you may as well do it right. While modern Hard Drives can only actually be Low Level Formated at the factory these days you can still take things on your own a far cry better than just what the newer XP style formating tool does, or even the old fashioned DOS utilities (which I think did a better job than the new XP does on cleaning up a drive).

I'll start with a warning, as that seems customary for these types of instructions. If it's a Mission Critical System your working on and you are less than clueless about what your doing, your best to probably not attempt doing any of this.

Like I said, if your going to wipe things out anyhow, you may as well go all the way with it and refresh that hard drive to as close as being factory clean and fresh as you can possibly get it.

You'll start by first identifying exactly what Hard Drive you have. Don't guess, don't go by a spec sheet provided with your system, open the thing up and physicaly pull it out of there so you can read it. May as well write down everything you read on the label as well, you might need some of that info later during the process and you aren't going to want to pull the drive out again just to get it or look it up because you forgot what it said.

Once you locate the brand name for the drive you have, as well as model etc... go to that manufacturers web site. I don't know of a single Hard Drive manufacturer that doesn't have the utilities you'll be there looking for or a web site, use google.

What you want to find on their web site are their disk utilities available for download, probably listed under a "downloads" or "support" section of their web site.

MAKE SURE YOU GET THE RIGHT UTILITY FOR YOUR BRAND AND MODEL DRIVE!

I've never tried this myself to find out for sure, but I've heard you will or could, permanently destroy your hard drive beyond repair by using a utility from the wrong Hard Drive Manufacturer on your drive.

Some of them still for the sake of things still refer to these utilities as Low Level Formatting Tools (even though that's not really what they are). They may also refer to them as "Zero Fill Utilities", or any one of a handfull of other names. The Zero Fill part is what your after though. Save the utillity to a bootable disk (lots of programs out there to make a boot disk).

Boot to that disk, run the Zero Fill Utility (your warned, it takes forever and a day, bigger the disk add more days), these utilities are pretty basic, in a worse case scenario, you may have simple on screen instructions to follow. Pull the disk out, your done with it. Insert your bootable Windows (or what ever Operating System your wanting to install) Installation CD and reboot.

If your installing Windows it's a no brainer if you can click a Yes or OK button and want to go with all the defaults which are the best options for most people anyhow. I wouldn't even worry at this point about installing any third party drivers if Windows XP is what your installing. The Install CD has at worse, generic drivers that will almost always get the install done and the system up and running on it's own, in most cases it has the actual Microsoft Approved drivers built into the Operating System for you already.

After the install you can worry about updating the drivers for your hardware, the core of your system will be up and running, you may not have unimportant devices like a working sound card or network card at first, but you can deal with all that after the install and Windows is up and running much easier than trying to do it during the install.

Do though, the actuall Zero Fill (Low Level Format) with the software from the Hard Drive manufacturer thats intended for this very purpose. Don't use any of the available third party type programs which claim to wipe your drive clean for you like Ghost, Disk Magic or Partition Magic or any simular products. These programs while they claim to do the same thing they do not. These are actually refered to as "Disk Overlay Programs", they may work for some situations, but the potential of problems they'll more likely create for you are the likely result. Why creat possible problems and spend money doing it by buying those programs when you can get the right tool for the job for free by just going to your Hard Drive Manufacturers web site.

I won't list all the potentials for disaster you could have with these programs like Disk Magic etc... you can look up all the problems yourself by searching Google for the term "drive overlay software program problems" now that you what what these programs are actually refered to as.

Lastly, I may as well toss this in there as well. Despite not being able to do it directly from within Windows, it is in actuallity possible to partition a hard drive somewhat easily (requires reading) without blowing out your current installation and doing a complete reinstall of the Operating System. It can be done manually without affecting your current install at all and without using Drive Overlay Programs like Partition Magic etc... It's possible despite what you may have heard. I'd be typing even more if I went into that right now and my fingers are already going numb as it is. You can search Google and find the info well documented out there, and it does work, I've done it without any complications or problems many times over.

Opps, one last bit or tip since I mentioned Multi Booting with different Operating Systems. There is a better, and easier way to do this type of project if it's what you desire, and it too can be done without the risk of doing any damage.

There's an excellant program out there called "VMWare" that makes running multiple Operating Systems a breeze, plus with the added benefit of not having to reboot to run the different Operating System. You can literally Fire up Windows and install the additional Operating Systems directly with in Windows with no risk to your existing system. Don't llike the new Operating System you installed with it, no need to uninstall or reconfigure anything, just delete the directory you installed it in, that easy. Switching between Operating Systems is as easy as opening and closing a new Window on your screen (with the added benefit of not running the risk of hosing up your Master Boot Record)...

http://www.vmware.com/