write zeros to hard drive

Hi you do know that if you write zeros to the hard drive that you will be destroying all of the information on the hard drive, this is what I call a low level format, are you sure that is what you want to do?   Have you tried doing an error check of the hard drive to see if the errors can be corrected? let me know    thanks   Terry

You can find programs to do this for you. Do a search on BartPE or Ultimate Boot CD. If you have another PC to work from you can download or build and burn these CDs which contain programs that you could use to zero fill your hard drive. There is also virus scanning tools on them... maybe you could clean up the hard drive.... The computer will boot from these types of CD and run the software directly from the CD and can access your hard drive without actually loading the OS from the hard drive.

Hi Terry , Thanks for the reply! I already did a repair fix with my disc. No good . The thing is my Daughter goes on so many garbage sites , AIM , MY SPACE , I-TUNES , Need i go on. She also isn't a fan up-dating virus def. or running scans . I am not even sure norton installed properly because how corupted her cache and hard drive is. I,am thinking her system is to far gone with corupt files and viruses. I'd be better off starting from scratch. Believe me its not something i am looking forward to. I had a Gateway for about 10 yrs. And wrote zeros and formated about 4 times and totally upgraded it myself    Ram , Hard Drive , Sound Cards, etc. So i am  technically inclined. The only thing is , it was easy to write zeros gateway. I would put disc in , tap F8 and there would would be a command to write zeros. Done! Dell way i can't figuer out.

Hi Tim  follow Bev's link and it will tell you how to do it on your computer, if you have the restore partition on your computer, which you should, let me know what you find out, have a great day   Terry

Thank you everyone for your responses. I am sure i'll be having alot of fun tonight. --------------Not