Formatting a hard drive outside of windows

Whats the best way to format a Hard drive outside of the operating system ?

my computer had some bugs and glitches awhile back and a big virus. I did a system recovery off of the partition. there has alot of progress but i still notice some glitches. I ordered some recovery discs but this time I want to wipe the hard drive completely and instal with the discs.

I tried that DBAN wipe but it doesnt go through all the way. I get some error messages. Worked on my old XP laptops though. I got windows 7 now.

I thought I remember seing a tool in the bios to format the hard drive outside the OS but cannot find it.

 

You want to format or erase the drive? If all you want to do is format, give gparted live or parted magic a try. gparted is as basic as it gets while parted magic includes a few other utilities such as firefox to allow you to do something else while you format.

You can either burn those to a disc or use unetbootin to make a bootable flash drive with the iso.

 

Formatting wipes the hard drive 100% like if it just came from the factory vs Erasing, correct ? Any links ?

 

A quick format will recreate a partition and mark the drive as empty, but the data will still be on it, it just won't be recoverable by normal means. A full format permanently erases all data i think. If that doesn't do it, then you can use dban or a similar utility to write zeros to the whole drive.

The fact that dban didn't complete might mean that the drive itself is damaged. You should be able to get a utility that will check the drive for bad sectors and smart errors from the drive manufacturer's website.

gparted: GParted -- Live CD/USB/PXE/HD
parted magic: downloads ? Parted Magic

 

To be absolutely sure nothing is left you can use Darik's Boot And Nuke: Darik's Boot And Nuke | Hard Drive Disk Wipe and Data Clearing

 

You can also boot off the windows CD and do recovery mode and format it.

 

link doesnt work, and I mentioned in the 1st post I tried it and it didnt go through.

 

Sorry... but the link works fine here.
You could also try DBAN from USB: Create a DBAN USB Flash Drive from Windows | USB Pen Drive Linux
What is the manufacturer of your HDD?
Sometime the manufacturer has its own tools like SeaTools form Seagate: | Seagate

 

says WDC in device manager. guessing thats western digital.

 

Correct.
Than you can use the Data Lifeguard Diagnostic:
WD Support / Downloads / WD Scorpio & AV-25 / WD Scorpio Blue
Options are:
QUICK TEST - performs SMART drive quick self-test to gather and verify the Data Lifeguard information contained on the drive.
EXTENDED TEST - performs a Full Media Scan to detect bad sectors. Test may take several hours to complete depending on the size of the drive.
WRITE ZEROS - writes zeros to the drive with options of Full Erase and Quick Erase. File system and data will be lost.
VIEW TEST RESULT - displays the latest test results.
So you can than test your drive (quick test) and fully erase (write zeros) your drive.

 

I downloaded it, it found no bad sectors. but I have a 640GB HD. It showed 320GB hard drive when scanning. I figured it would have scanned the entire thing not just one partion since its scanning outside the OS.