How do I prepare a new to me used hard drive?

[sncdrvr]

Greetings! The more I've researched this the more confused I've become with this issue. What is easiest cheapest way to format a used hard drive(Hitachi IDE out of a Dell) for use in a T30. Will be installing XP from the factory restore disk set. I have Killdisk for erasing, and a copy of the HMD that lists a erase option, and know how to access the PC doctor utilities from restore disk#1, but I just dont get this "format" thing. How to get a used drive prepared like out of the box factory new to readily accept the restore disks. Just running the restore disks on a used drive usually results in XP without the restore partition or the IBM utilities. The one time I used a new hard drive the installation was perfect. Any help will be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

[rkawakami]

I use PC Doctor's erase hard drive utility to prep any used hard drive prior to a factory restore. Killdisk may be "overkill" in the sense that you don't have to do a DoD erase of the drive; wiping out the boot sector, partition table and FAT should be enough to make the re-install of the OS go cleanly.

[sncdrvr]

O.k. got it. Haven't tried the PC doctor erase utility, been using Killdisk. When using Killdisk I usually see two partitions on a hard drive and have to erase each partition seperately, which makes me wonder if that partition still exists after erasing and partition is causing the installation problems. Have 2 used hard drives coming for 2 T30's built from parts for my oldest son and father. Having to run the restore disks 2-3 times to get a factory install with the F11 option available in Bios got old several builds ago. I'll try the PC Doctor on one and the Hardware Maintence Diskette v1.75 erase on the other. Thankyou!

[sncdrvr]

Well, I'll never use Killdisk again to erase or format a drive, had been using the free version. I "erased" one drive with PC Doctor utility, a somewhat long procedure (yes, the whole drive, yeah I know, Ray says only the first part needs erased but I was afraid to stop it!)), and got a perfect "factory" install of XP with the restore partition, F11 option, and all IBM utilities. On the other drive I used the IBM Hardware Maintenance Diskette v1.75 "format hard drive" utility and also got a perfect install. Have to say that the HMD utility was faster and recommend it if one has a floppy drive, otherwise the PC Doctor erase utility worked perfect in prepping the drive. I think I'm finally beginning to figure this stuff out! Thanks for the great help!

[gery350]

ok totally rookie question............
so if i clone a hard drive to a hdd that has information on it, is it possible that the previous data can somehow interfere or creat issues with the new clone install?
thanks gery.

[rkawakami]

No, it should not have any problems. As long as the drive is properly erasing and writing information, that is. Think of it this way... an erased drive simply has a whole bunch of zeros (or ones) on it, while a drive that has "information" has a random combination of zeros and ones. (This ignores the use of a DoD hard drive wipe.)

Now, if we're talking about your cloning operation/program not properly taking into account some boot track or partitioning data, then yes, you could have a problem. I've used an old version of Ghost to clone drives, re-writing a drive that was once in a 600X with a T41 installation, for example, and not had any problems. The original question in this thread had to do with re-installing the OS from a factory restore disk. In that case, for some reason, it seems to work better with an erased drive. With a clone, it's supposed to copy just the valid data structures on the original disk (i.e., not any unused disk sectors) onto the destination drive. Whatever disk sectors on the destination drive that remain un-touched by the clone operation will appear to the operating system as "free space" and be used accordingly.

In short, I don't bother to erase a drive that's going to be used in a cloning operation.

ref: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disk_cloning