Need to completely wipe hard drive.

I've got a 1Tb. Samsung hard drive with about 100 megabytes of an old OS on it.
Is there a free or inexpensive program I can use to get rid of it?
I tried to format it and it's not happening.
I want the whole HD bare so I can do a clean install on it with no problems.
I'm using Windows7 Pro x64.
Thanks for any help.
Hugger

 

Option #1
Use DBAN.
That'll do the trick.

Option #2
If you're familar with Linux, you could do the following from a live-cd:

Code:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdX

This will overwrite your hard drive one time with zeros.
(X should be replaced with the proper letter for the harddrive)

Option #3
Use CopyWipe. It's free as in beer, but not open-source.

1 & 3 are bootable iso-images, just DL, check md5sum and burn to cd.
Beware that proper wiping a hard drive takes a long time - several hours.

 

Samsung offers a utility which includes an option:
ERASE HDD : 0-write or low level format
http://www.samsung.com/global/business/hdd/support/utilities/Support_HUTIL.html

 

You can delete the partition(s), then create a new one(s). This will allow it to be written over completely. Unless you have a technical issue or privacy issue, it is the easiest method IMO.

Sul.

 

But wouldn't it be possible to recover data by using something like TestDisk then? As I understand it, making new partitions will only overwrite the MBR* not the data itself?

*Master Boot Record

 

The Partition Wizard bootable CD has the options to write "zeros" to all hard sectors, write "ones" to all hard drive sectors or both (one after the other).

 

Hi, Sul.
That worked great. I'm now formatting my 2 new G drives.
How do I make them into 1 G drive?

 

Disregard. A re-boot did the trick.
Thanks everybody for your help.
Hugger

 

Yes, it probably would. However, the question did not ask for a security wipe, so I gave the easiest method I know of that would allow you to "wipe" the disk if all you need to do is re-install, especially considering he could not format it for some reason. Deleting the partitions and then recreating them will force a reformat, which was what I was trying to get to happen because he said it would not format.

Sul.