jerrys Posted May 13, 2005 Report Share Posted May 13, 2005 the question is if instead of formating my hard drive i instead wipe it clean with software can i still use the recovery disks that came with the machine? i want top give this machine away but dont want any information left on it, i never received a windows xp disk , it must be part of the recovery disks. it is a sony machine. thanks jerrys Quote Link to post Share on other sites
shanenin Posted May 13, 2005 Report Share Posted May 13, 2005 (edited) With the recovery disks I have used, they reformat and reinstall windows to factory specs. You say "wipe it clean", you mean completely erase it by writing ones(or is it 0's) to the drive before using the recovery disks, that should work fine.I have even chopped up my drive into seperate partitions, ntfs, fat32, and linux type, then used the recovery disks, they reformat it into one big ntfs partition just like it came from the factory. Edited May 13, 2005 by shanenin Quote Link to post Share on other sites
jerrys Posted May 13, 2005 Author Report Share Posted May 13, 2005 that is what i want , over write the data thats on the hard drive. having never done this i was not sure , there are 4 disks for recovery, hopefuly it is some thing i can do thanks for the help. jerrys Quote Link to post Share on other sites
Chappy Posted May 13, 2005 Report Share Posted May 13, 2005 Ummm...if you wipe the entire drive clean, that may include the hidden partition with the OS image that the recovery disks use to restore the OS.If you plan on giving this machine away with an OS installed on it, I don't believe you want to go this route, but if you intend on giving it away as an empyt HDD, then it will be fine.I would check to see if the eraser program you're going to run can recognize the hidden image partition first and skip that area if possible. Otherwise your recovery disks will be useless. Quote Link to post Share on other sites
shanenin Posted May 13, 2005 Report Share Posted May 13, 2005 (edited) once when my harddrive quit working, HP sent me a new one, with no image on it. The recovery disks completely reformated it. none the less, I may be wrong you may want to research it a little more, but I feel confident they will have no problem restoring your OS.edit added later//there is a chance that hp sent me a blank harddrive with a "hidden recovery partition", but my gut says it was just a plain blank harddrive. Maybe sony does stuff differently then HP Edited May 13, 2005 by shanenin Quote Link to post Share on other sites
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