How to format hard drive

[Ahhlong]

Any idea on how to totally format a hard drive including windows ? Doing this as I am going to install a clean fresh windows 8 on the hard drive . So any idea on how ? I wanna totally wipe every single thing .

[acidydragon]

Put the CD in, when it asks where to install, click Advanced, and you can click the partitions and format from there.

[Fred Castellum]

Start the windows 8 installation and format it through that. Or get Gparted and format it that way. 

[Drown]

Boot using your Windows 8 CD, and in the installation "menu" click on Advanced settings, and you will be able to select which drive/partition you want to use. In that menu, select all your drives/partitions and click "format" (pink eraser icon) and it should wipe it. Then, reinstall the new Windows on one of these partitions, and voila, you have a fresh computer.

 

Note : It doesn't delete your files AFAIK, it just deletes the reference to them. This means that they still physically exist until something else is written over them. You can use some programs to completely erase it (write layers and layers of blank files over the old ones) but that's for the people who really are hiding some shady stuff.

[Ahhlong]

But I really wanna remove all the things as I don't wanna waste any space on the hard drive

[KamiKatze]

While we're at it. Can anyone recommend a program to format a hard drive compeletley, so that it can't even be recovered anymore? Something that puts like 6-7 full write and read cycles over your data so you can sell it?

[rustikles]

While we're at it. Can anyone recommend a program to format a hard drive compeletley, so that it can't even be recovered anymore? Something that puts like 6-7 full write and read cycles over your data so you can sell it?

DBAN is widely regarded as the best free utility for this. I use it all the time at work.

[rustikles]

But I really wanna remove all the things as I don't wanna waste any space on the hard drive

When Drown said formatting deletes the references for them, your drive will act no differently than if it was completely empty space. Your computer just sees the space with previous data as empty because there is no reference, and writes to is as such. 

 

If it's a security issue you're worried about, check out DBAN which will write over all the space with random data and make anything previously there essentially unrecoverable.