Formating a hard disk.

best way...is to take it out and melt it with a blow torch... or go here http://www.killdisk.com/eraser.htm

Thankx for the link China.... I like the blow torch idea better

Anytime

Blow torch!!!

You can go to the site of your hard drive maker and download a floppy file that will 'low-level' format your drive...that's what the factory does before it ships.

Try this site

http://www.newfreeware.com/utils/1417/

They seem to have a lot of free utilities that will do what you need

Hope it helps

I happen to like the blow torch method...call me "paranoid"

There is a program called “Delete All” that you can download for free. Tech TV talked about it awhile back.

do what yrag suggests...

or you could run an app that works 99.9% of the time and ends up killing your drive that odd time around...

Stick with factory utilities for hardware such as IDE drives when possible...

What OS are you using?

I reread what you typed. You basically want it non-formated but erased So you would have to format it after you erase everything. Because most drives when you get them aren't formated. At least most/all my new drives weren't.

A hard drive cannot simply be erased. It must be written over at least 3 times.http://www.pcworld.com/howto/article/0,aid,110338,00.asp
There are plenty of free programs (like BCWIPE) that will do that.

try killdisk. awesome program.

I think it is pretty much obvious that He does want to format the drive when the topic of the thread is "Formating a Hard Disk" sheesh

But to format it to what? FAT 32 or NTFS? But completely clean. Now usually you or I had to format the harddrive to work right. This is called FDisking. You have to do this for the system to work right.

/me Needs more details. Input Input Input Input Input

Echoing Weaksid, especially if you are formatting to NTFS, and even more critically, NTFS under WinXP, you need to FDisk or risk winding up with unmountable boot volumes or other nasty errors.

Also don't know if you want to wipe for security reasons or anything, but if you want to make sure nothing can be recovered from the previously stored data you will need some type of shredder or wipe utility that will overwrite the data several times before formatting.
[Message Edited]

Ok. It took me the entire night last night and the entire day today to do everything I wanted to do with my PC.
I did a major upgrade to it and I'm giving away my old hard disk. That is the reson why I wanted to wipe out the entire disk. The Killdisk program I got from China's link did the job, but just to make sure, I also used WipeDrive.
I tried to look for a file to 'low-level' the disk but I couldnt find any in the WD site.
I did a (1) pass overwrite with Killdisk and a (3) pass overwrite with WipeDrive.
Thank you all for the help and inputs.

Your welcome Glad you got it done