How to erase/clean HD??

[yosh2000]

hello, i dont know if this is the right place to post or not, but here goes

my 3 yr old dell labtop has been running wierd and i have been getting a lot of programs "not responding" and shutting down on me automatically. dell said to reformat the HD and reinstal windows XP, which i did. i have a 30GB HD, the problem is that after i reformated it, it says i only have 26.4 GB out of 27.9 GB free, if this was a fresh reinstal, shouldnt the numbers match up?

also, i have a few folders still in the "programs files" folders that i know did not come with the computer(ie "xerox"), so this leads me to believe that there is still junk on my HD.

my question is this, how do i completely erase EVERYTHING on my HD in order to start completely over and the HD be just like the day i purchased it, with no junk on there at all??

thanks in advance for the help!

[Panama Red]

Boot to your XP CD (the one that came with your Dell), select New Installation (NOT repair console). Next it will scan your system for existing installations and offer you another repair option. Select new installation instead. When it shows you the available partition(s) for installation, delete the partition(s) and then either do the installation to the one large partition (actually, it's the entire hard drive) or create whatever configuration of partitions you choose and then install XP to the C: partition. Select NTFS as the file system when you reformat. Extra partitions must be formatted once windows is installed. You can do that in Disk Management.

[Cricket]

To clean off a hard drive you can also use a zero-fill utility that will over-write everything on the drive with zeros and put it in the same state as when the hard drive was brand new. KillDisk (http://www.killdisk.com/) is a zero-fill utility and it's free.

:) Cricket

[glc]

There may be a diagnostic partition on there, but it's generally only 32mb or so. It's best to leave that alone.

[yosh2000]

To clean off a hard drive you can also use a zero-fill utility that will over-write everything on the drive with zeros and put it in the same state as when the hard drive was brand new.

that is EXACTLY what i was looking for, thank you so much!!