Hard Drive Format. Not fully deleted???

It is absolutely possible to erase your entire hard drive and restore your computer to factory defaults.

But you need to perform an action called a Disk Wipe. Installing your OS again will just create another version of Windows. All your old files and directories will still take up space on the other version and you'll have an annoying prompt every time you boot up asking which version of Windows you want to use.

A Disk Wipe will completely erase everything on the hard drive and after that you can install your Operating System and start over with an empty computer. (Obviously your OS will include My Computer, the trash can, and I.E.)

I recommend using an application called Eraser. It's good for this type of thing: http://www.heidi.ie/node/6

And here's the FAQ link with info about wiping an entire drive and reinstalling Windows: http://www.heidi.ie/node/84

hi mgchim, do not mess with bios or registry now if you just formated then let's do it again with a few tricks i was taught but read everything that i am telling you before you begin. what you are seeing is old drivers i have yried to remove mine too but they are not taking up no room on your harddrive so they are a ghost. remove all your virus protection then hit start>settings>control panel then hit the system icon and then hit the advanced tab hit system performance button then check best look for my system performance then you will notice that all of the boxes are unchecked and you color went darker. go back to the advaneced tab again and hit memory you will see a box in it you will see kernal % and beside it is a drop down screen place in the box complete memory dump. now put your new system diskett in and reboot cause you are ready to format. good luck hope i have been helpful to you

definite because of the fact formatting basically clears the record tables, and would not rewrite the entire disk. That operation takes a great style of time. So, unique documents will nevertheless be on there and a few kit can extract the preparation. you ought to use a gadget that wipes the preparation after it is formatted.

Well, it depends on who manufactured your computer. If you're reinstalling via the install disc that the manufacturer gave you, then it'll be factory configuration. This usually means it has all the bloatware and other crap that they install on it will be on it again. If you just want to surf the internet, install Linux. Free, and easy to use for basic tasks like that. Just install firefox.

you have to go through your bios and set your boot device sequence to use your optical drive(cd/dvd) first. then insert the disk. and its pretty simple after that. IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO ERASE TO THE EXTENT DESCRIBED ABOVE THOUGH.