Reusing a few hard drives from old Sky+ boxes?

Access

A simple question...

How would i go about wiping a few old 160gb hard drives from some old sky boxes for reuse with a windows pc?

I am running Win 7 and have a usb enclosure to put them in to format them but need to wipe them first as they have at least 4 partitions and i cant get windows to delete the partitions.

Thanks.

Beez

Access wrote: »

A simple question...

How would i go about wiping a few old 160gb hard drives from some old sky boxes for reuse with a windows pc?

I am running Win 7 and have a usb enclosure to put them in to format them but need to wipe them first as they have at least 4 partitions and i cant get windows to delete the partitions.

Thanks.

Some partitioning software would do it like Partition Magic. They usually need to be booted from rarther than installed from Windows.

bonzodog2

You could use http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/download.html, possibly booting from a USB stick if your PC allows this. At a command prompt, use fdisk. Make sure you don't wipe the Win7 installation !

[edit] or any other live Linux, DSl is very small.
[edit] having looked at the site, you might find another easier.....

Bosh

This works too - Easus

GreenWolfe

GParted Live CD - you'll be able to partition the drives graphically.

Access

Thanks for the tips but, not looking to partition the drives at all... i just want to wipe them back to new - no partitions at all and then just format back to NTFS or FAT for use in some pc or usb enclosure as a handy external hard drive.

GreenWolfe

Access wrote: »

Thanks for the tips but, not looking to partition the drives at all... i just want to wipe them back to new - no partitions at all and then just format back to NTFS or FAT for use in some pc or usb enclosure as a handy external hard drive.

After you wipe them (with Darik's Boot and Nuke to name one example) they'll need to be formatted and partitioned, even if there's only to be one partition on the disk. After the wipe you could do this in Windows or with a LiveCD, whichever you prefer.

EDIT: Ultimate Boot CD has a lot of these utilities on one disc (including DBAN), it's worth taking a look at.

The_Thing

Any of these Sky boxes I've opened up have had the older PATA type drives in them. Is your USB enclosure PATA or SATA?

Access

Yeah, they are pata... but its a spare pata pc and a spare pata enclosure i have so no problems there.

Beez

Access wrote: »

Thanks for the tips but, not looking to partition the drives at all... i just want to wipe them back to new - no partitions at all and then just format back to NTFS or FAT for use in some pc or usb enclosure as a handy external hard drive.

But these programs will probably allow you to delete any partitions on the drive allowing Windows to be installed on it

Access

Sorted!

Thanks to all for the tips... i ended up using Danks boot and nuke on an old spare pc with each drive connected each time... (easiest method for me) and then I formatted them after they were attached to a usb caddy. Drives are all NTFS now and working perfect as occasional backup drives.

One downside was that it took well over 3 hours for danks to erase the drives (160GB drives)

But dont mind as all sorted now.

Thanks again all.

The clean command in diskpart should have worked too. No third party software needed.