So i'm going to wipe my hard drive and i was wondering what i do after i have completely wiped it. My Computer cape with three recovery disc's. Do i just pop the disc's in and boot from them?

I'm also using Dban for wiping the hard drive

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Permalink Reply by michael on July 14, 2010 at 7:54pm

ya you should be able to just put the cds in and boot up, and the system should be reinstalled. Also one of your cds could be one that installs all the crap software and you don't need it.

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Permalink Reply by Wandering I on July 14, 2010 at 8:03pm

Hold on there dude...depending on what was factory installed on that thing you might not want to wipe the drive entirely. First check and see if they originally installed a recovery partition on the drive at the factory. This partition usually is unaccessible in windows but it will show up the in the drive manager in administrative tools. If theres a partition there DO NOT DELETE IT. It contains the software required to restore your HD image on those recovery cd's. If in doubt, just leave the drive as is, and throw in the cd's. If you do a factory restore, it will wipe the drive anyway and restore the factory image.

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Permalink Reply by Jack McEvoy on July 14, 2010 at 8:48pm

Thanks guys

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Permalink Reply by Jack McEvoy on July 14, 2010 at 9:06pm

Is this what you are talking about? Is it showing a partition with my C: and D: Drive's?

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Permalink Reply by Wandering I on July 14, 2010 at 9:37pm

Bingo, that would be it. Your D drive is your recovery partition. Your best bet is to just throw in your first recovery cd and boot from that, you might have to hit a certain key when booting to bring up your restore stuff, but after that you should have the option to restore the system back to its original factory disk image.

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Permalink Reply by Jack McEvoy on July 14, 2010 at 9:56pm

Thanks allot for your help man :)

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Permalink Reply by Christopher Whalen on July 15, 2010 at 4:54am

Magnet.. very big magnet. Will wipe your hard drive clean and depending on how strong the polarity is, probably every other storage device within 5' of you too. ;)