Going to Erase HD -- Do I need to make a boot disk?

[crud_tud]

My system has one hard drive and runs XP home edition. I want to completely erase the contents of the hard drive and then reinstall XP. I was planning on using something like killdisk (see www.killdisk.com).

If I go ahead and do the full erase, will I need a special boot disk to install XP home again or can I simply stick the Windows XP CD into the optical drive and boot up off of the CD?

[EzyStvy]

boot up off of the CD

[bozo]

I am not familiar with "killdisk", but you can just "format" the hard drive, which will erase the drive, and make it ready for a clean XP install.

As EzyStvy says you will want to boot to the CD. In most cases you will have to change a bios setting to boot to CD as the first boot device.

I don't know if you do this, but I also "partition my drive after I format it, and then put your operating system on a dedicated partition by itself. Doing this will allow you in the future, to just format the OS partition, leaving your other data and programs intact.

[TheMajor]

When formatting the harddrive won't erase data right away. If you are deleting a bunch of files from anywhere on your disk, the system tells the drive which files in which locations you are "removing". The drive will then goto it's table and remove the file's entry (or folder's entry) and remove it from the table. This way, the drive no longer "thinks" that the removed file is still on the drive. The files actually don't even move.....they are all still on the physical drive. The file(s) get removed (or over written) when you add an application or more files to replace the area on the drive where the other files physically were.

A good way to think of it is like a book. All of your data is stored in "chapters" and their location is recorded in a "table of contents". When you delete something, the operating system erases the "chapter" or files location from the "table of contents". The chapter is still in the book, but it doesnt show it in the table of contents, or to the user.

So what that means to you is even if you empty your recycle bin or format ur harddrive, you can use data recovery software to get that data back. to permanently erase data you use disk wiping software that wipes the entire hard disk, the free space, or just certain files. disk wiping takes a long time to do.

Instead of the actual disk-space being marked as ready for use, it will take something like 0010 1101 etc and write it to 0000 0000... all the way through, mutiple times. The applications needs to do this about 7-12 times at least to make sure nobody can recover ur files. be warned, though. you dont want to do this on an old drive (I'd say 10 years or so) since much of the HDD info is contained on it's own manufacturers partition and if you write zero's it wont know what it is. be a pain in the a$$ to fix. anyhow, for example there is first aid I think by western digital.

Make sure to set the CD-ROM as primary boot device in your BIOS to be able to boot from it.