Reformatting HD and recovery Disks

[hodad]

My wife's Z61m is 3 years old and has accumulated a lot of junk and been infected with a virus. I have dealt with it as best as possible but now it's just time to reformat the drive and reinstall from the IBM recovery disks. It's slow and crashes all the time.

Do the disks reformat the drive before installation? I have read the disks need a clean hard drive. If so, what's the best way to accomplish this? Does anyone know of a good step-by-step guide for dummies for cleaning the drive before installation?

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

[RealBlackStuff]

Read the Recovery FAQ in the ** HOW TOs & FAQs ** Forum

[hodad]

If you are referring to the one entitled "How to use recovery disk cd set" I have already doen so. It appears to be a verbatim recitation of the instructions Lenovo sends with the set. It does not answer my questions re: do i need a clean drive for my purposes and if so how do i clean it properly before starting the recovery cd set.

Thank you for your reply.

[RealBlackStuff]

If you have a set of recovery disks, then you should first use either of these: Killdisk or DBAN
http://www.killdisk.com/downloadfree.htm (available in floppy and CD)
http://www.dban.org/download
They'll totally wipe your HD.
When done, set your BIOS to boot first from CD/DVD and start the recovery procedure.
Prepare for quite a long session...

[RRHODY]

Wondering - I've used Hitachi Drive Fitness Test Utility to do a format before a restore; followed by FDISK and Windows format. This was under the impression that this DFT FULL FORMAT was considered a LOW Level FORMAT and would erase the disk (including the MBR) of all previous data. Am I incorrect and should I have used the two programs listed above?

[RealBlackStuff]

If it worked for you, you be grand.
Normally you only use the WIPE function of one of those above programs.
The recovery program does the partitioning and all the other stuff.

[hodad]

Thanks RBS! I'll give it a try.