How do I wipe my old drive?

I recently sucessfully installed a new 200gb hard drive to use in addition to my original 40gb hard drive. I am using the new drive as my main drive and plan to use the old drive just for additional storage space. Using the Maxblast software that came with my new drive, I was able to copy all of the information from the old drive to my new drive. Now I think I would like to erase the information from the old drive. How do I go about doing this?

 

Delete all partitions on old drive in disk manager (rt-clk my computer in the start menu or in explorer.exe > manage > disk manager). Then repartition to your liking and reformat.

 

If you want to use the old drive yourself, the solution suggested by sparrow would work perfectly (you just have to be logged in as Administrator).

But if you are getting rid of the old drive, this offers very little protection as your data is physical present on your hard disk and can be recovered even after formatting. You have to then use utils which write 0 & 1 many times on your hard disk to erase the data.

 

I'm going to try to follow Sparrow's advice. This is kind of new ground for me, so I may need walked through the steps. Once I'm in Disk Management, it looks like I can right click on the old drive and click on Delete Partition. After that, to repartition and reformat, do I right click again and click on format? Thanks for the advice so far.

 

Hello Bucksone,

You can delete and Format partitions following Sparrow's instructions, what you can't do is create new partitions thru XP (one exception is with the XP install disc).

You need a program like Partition Magic to create or re-size partitions.

So if you want to have one big partition - the whole drive - or keep the current partitions if more than one, formatting will erase the info.

Regards - Charles

 

Mission accomplished! I followed Sparrow's instructions and all seems to have gone well. All I needed was for the old drive to have one big partition. Thanks to all for the comments.