aagh! Change HD from System to Data - ie wipe, zap clea

[mike2h]

MBR's seem to hava a haunting mystique about them all I want to know is how to make the former (Win7 rc/beta) system disk
become a simple data disk. ie reformat, wipe, clean set to unallocated.

Background:

a Disk0 466gb SATA current system installed with official GA release Win7 Ultimate 64 on one single disk with single NTFS partition:

(C Healthy(System, Boot, Page File, Active, Crash Dump, Primary Partition). All works reasonably well (eg hotswapping DATA disks etc.) but slower than January beta or later RC.

b Re-booted with just C: then, once Windows running, added (hot-swapped in) old system disk -

Disk2 466gb SATA OLD system installed with the following NTFS partitions:

(H 100mb Healthy (Primary Partition) [System Reserved]
(G 232gb NTFS Healthy (Primary Partition)
(D 233gb NTFS Healthy (Active, Primary Partition)

I'd be grateful for the simple commands to wipe Disk2 - H:,G: and D: eg diskpart fixmbr etc.( MSDN/Technet guidance borders on the impenetrable.)

I've also checked Sevenforums Tutorials - they also seem to focus on restore/repair - all I want is to have a clean data disk.

Thanks.

 

[torrentg]

Can you delete the partitions and format the drive to NTFS using disk management?

 

[mike2h]

Have not tried to format until I can find out if format will erase the system stuff.

 

[torrentg]

Sure. Deleting the partitions and formatting the whole drive should make all the space usable to place anything you want on there. Shouldn't be any difficulties. Straight-forward process. You can use an app like Eraser on it after if you have sensitive data on there now that you don't ever want to be seen again by anyone.

 

[mike2h]

Many thanks will give it a try and report back.

 

[mike2h]

No problem -

Went to ControlPanel>ComputerManagement>DiskManagement

then rightclick>Delete Volume for each partition of Disk2

then quick format.

All ok - thanks.

 

[torrentg]

Nice, glad things are right for ya.