[dba-Tech] How to totally wipe everything on a computer

[Jim Lawrence]

Hi Arthur:

When working for various financial institutions the product killdisk was applied to all decommissioned equipment. We usually ran three passes but one pass is very thorough: http://www.killdisk.com/downloadfree.htm

Jim

----- Original Message -----
From: "Arthur Fuller" <fuller.artful at gmail.com>
To: "Discussion of Hardware and Software issues" <dba-tech at databaseadvisors.com>
Sent: Wednesday, April 29, 2015 8:22:32 AM
Subject: [dba-Tech] How to totally wipe everything on a computer

Fortunately I have two computers, so I can continue working with the laptop
while trying to re-configure the ancient tower. The goal is to set up a
dual boot into the tower. I'm having several problems. Before I get to
those, the box has two hard disks, 80GB and a 250GB. First of all, I wiped
all partitions from both disks, using EaseUS Partition Manager. Then I
restarted the computer, but to my dismay Grub was still there, and (since I
wiped the disk) failed to find Debian. So I repeated the exercise and got
the same result again. Then I went into the BIOS and had a look to see
which hard disk was the default boot disk, only to find that I was unable
to change that, for some reason (plus and minus didn't work to
promote/demote the disks).

So, what I'd like to try next is to restore the tower to its virgin state:
no partitions, no MBR, etc. But it appears that the EaseUS partition
manager does not fry the MBR, and consequently Grub still loads. I cannot
figure out why this happens, but anyway I want to fix it. I now understand
that once I finally fix this problem, I should boot from my Windows 7
installation disk, install Windows and its updates, and then reboot to see
if all is well. If all is well, then I'll reboot using the Debian
installation disk, point to the other disk as the place to install Debian
Linux 14, and then (in theory) Grub will detect that Windows 7 is already
installed and offer to add it to the Grub boot menu.

First things first: how can I restore this tower to its virgin state, with
no MBR at all? If I can get there, then perhaps the other steps will fall
naturally into place.


-- 
Arthur
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