Wiping the hard disk clean

I want to install Windows XP Professional on a clean hard disk. I plan to use "Darik's Boot and Nuke"
http://dban.org/ to wipe the disk clean. Is this a good idea?

Regards,

Yes.

The Hard Disk of course needs to be partitioned when installing XP. I am not familiar with partitioning. Is there a simple method or program that I can do this with?

Thank you,

You can do it with a Bootable Partition Wizard CD

Partition Wizard : Use the Bootable CD

Melita said:

The Hard Disk of course needs to be partitioned when installing XP. I am not familiar with partitioning. Is there a simple method or program that I can do this with?

Thank you,

And you can also use the XP disc and a calculator to do your partitioning.

1 GB = 1024 MB

200 GB partition would equal 204,800 MB simple

But using the PW disc is sooooo much easier and the preferred method of millions of Happy Windows 7 users all over the World.

King Arthur said:

Make absolutely certain to connect only the HDD you want to wipe before you start DBAN. DBAN will wipe any and all HDDs it can detect on startup.

To quote DBAN's website:

DBAN is a self-contained boot disk that automatically deletes the contents of any hard disk that it can detect.

Thank you. I will make sure to have only the HDD that I want erased, connected.

Regards,

AddRAM said:

Melita said:

The Hard Disk of course needs to be partitioned when installing XP. I am not familiar with partitioning. Is there a simple method or program that I can do this with?

Thank you,

And you can also use the XP disc and a calculator to do your partitioning.

1 GB = 1024 MB

200 GB partition would equal 204,800 MB simple

But using the PW disc is sooooo much easier and the preferred method of millions of Happy Windows 7 users all over the World.

When you say "you can also use the XP disk", I take it to mean the option offered to partition the disk during the process of installing XP. If I am correct, is there any advantage in using the PW disk over the XP option?

Thank you,

King Arthur said:

Make absolutely certain to connect only the HDD you want to wipe before you start DBAN. DBAN will wipe any and all HDDs it can detect on startup.

To quote DBAN's website:

DBAN is a self-contained boot disk that automatically deletes the contents of any hard disk that it can detect.

I booted with DBAN but it failed to erase the disk. I have installed Ubuntu in it and it is still there. I booted with it three times using only 'autonuke' option because I don't know anything about the other five options given. At the end of the process I got the following message.

"DBAN finished with no fatal errors"
The following was displayed in the log:
Error : dev/sde (process crash)
Error : dev/sdb (process crash)
Error : dev/sdd (process crash)
Error : dev/sdc (process crash)
Error : dev/sda (process crash)
What can I do now? I am really keen on cleaning the disk before installing XP, although it may not be necessary to do so.

Thank you,

See if this will help you partition the hard drive . It has photos

Partitioning A Blank Hard Drive During XP Installation