How do I empty my hard drive?

[Lonnie]

After reading many of the posts on this board I'm embarrassed to admit my dilemma which, in my opinion, probably stumps no one here but myself.

My question involves hard drives. A few months ago I had a second hard drive installed. This became the master hard drive. The old hard drive, the slave, still has it's original two partitions. I would like to use one of the partitions to backup my master hard drive on to.

The partition that will be used as a backup is the first partition on the old hard drive. This partition had been Drive C until the new drive was installed. This partition is now Drive D. This is the partition I would like to use to backup my new Drive C.

These are my questions. Before using this partition as a backup I would first like to completely clean out whatever is on there so that there's enough space for the backup. Keep in mind that this is the old drive C, has since been ghosted onto the new hard drive,i.e. the new C, and is no longer needed.

In order to clean this partition, is formatting the way to go?

If all I need to do is format, is it as easy as right clicking on the partition (Drive D) and clicking on "Format" (Win98)?

According to the posts I've read the other partition on this hard drive will be left untouched in this process.

Slightly panicked,
Lonnie

[mosquito]

just do format and everything will be gone (you will see an empty drive in Windows explorer.) The answers in the other thread are valid if you want to prevent other people from ever recovering your data from the drive.
If you want to leave the drive in your system, format will do just fine

[archie]

That would be correct Lonnie, your partitions will remain intact if you format. Perhaps this is out of habit but I've never used format from within Windows. It probably is as good.
I would just go to DOS and type "format d:" or "format d: /q" without the quotes. The "/q" [quick] would make it happen in seconds.

[reboot]

You may like to read this.
It explains a backup and restore process using a second HD and/or partition.