how to wipe a laptop?

Dutchboy

hey all!

im fairly clueless about how operating systems and the reinstallation of it among other things!
id like to completely wipe my laptop for when i go back to college. Is it as simple as reinstalling windows or do i have to do multiple other things?
thanks in advance for your help!

The Muppet

If its XP just boot off your XP cd and follow the instructions. When asked do you want to format the partition select yes.

davmigil

I suppose the answer two both questions is:

yes - it is as simple as re-installing windows

yes - it may involve multiple other things:
For instance if you are in the secret service or are selling on laptop and want to make sure any data is definitely unrecoverable. In that case you would want to erase the hard drive with something like darik's boot and nuke: dban.sourceforge.net/ before hand.

Even if you are just re-installing windows you may have to re-install drivers afterwards (e.g onboard sound/graphics). Also will need to apply windows updates and reinstall anti virus etc.

Webmonkey

Windows 98, me:

Create a Startup Disk, more than likely the bios is set to load a boot disk first, if not tell me.
Better still you can just use the windows 98 cd. When you start your computer, load up the bios. It should say the key on start up to enter this. Usually Del, F2. Should tell you anyways. In there search for a place to edit the boot sequence. When you find it set it to CDROM as the first boot device. Of course every bios is different but hope you can understand what i mean here.

Place the CD In, let the computer boot the CD on startup. Should get a boot menu:

Boot From Hardisk
Boot from CD.

Choose CD, and then a new menu will come up. Choose "start computer with CDROM support". - Give that time to laod.

It should tell you the letter of your cdrom drive. Probably D, so taking that it is D, enter this:
and hit enter.
Next type:
CD Win98 and hit enter
and now type
Format C: Select Y to that option.

Now it should format your hard disk (Wiping it clean and planting the FAT file system)

Now type:
cd.. and hit enter
and next,
setup and hit enter.
Follow instructions from there. You should have all your drive cds availble for the graphics card, sound card etc. More than likely windows 98 wont have these drivers for you.


FOR XP,2000

Do the same as i said there in the bios so that you can boot from cd.
Place xp,2000 cd in and it will ask you to press any key to boot from cd.

Luckly the setup here is much easier. You can do all the formating within the setup and a quick format option too if you dont want to wait. Basically when you go through setup you'll come to a stage where it asks you to set up a partition. Well delete it by following its instructions and create a new one and format. All instructions there.
Winxp is packed full of drivers, so you might get away with some drivers, but still better install the ones you get if you have them even afterwards.

Ok hope this helps

tribble

If you want to wipe it in such a way as nothing is recoverable by anyone then used DBAN (sorry too lazy to find a link for you, google it)

It's an open source bootable CD which will wipe either partitions or entire HD's with a choice of patterns.

Dutchboy

thanks guys!
monkey great reply thanks!