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December 6th, 2014 09:00
Formatting a hard drive
Hey,
So I bought a ssd and used the "dell back up and recovery disk" to install windows 8.1 64 bit on it. My issue is now I, for the life of me, cannot figure out how to format the stock hard drive without reinstalling windows on it. I tried to talk to three windows tech people over a period of three hours and they were completely useless. I think I have to create a bootable disk on my usb flash drive to start the process; however, how I do that and what I do after that are both unknown to me. This is really frustrating because reformatting the hard drive used to be a relatively easy thing to accomplish, but now, for some reason, I can't figure out what to do. Any help with on completely wiping the stock hard drive WITHOUT reinstalling windows (all three windows tech people couldn't understand why I didn't want to reinstall windows on the hard drive) would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks for the help,
me
ejn63
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December 6th, 2014 10:00
Control panel, administrative tools, disc management -- you can format the drive from there. Or for that matter, right-click on the icon from the drive and you can do it that way.
Jiveturkey
6 Posts
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December 6th, 2014 10:00
So the problem in that situation is if I have both hard drives in it automatically boots from the stock drive. How do I get it to boot from the ssd so I can format it through Windows because, otherwise, it says I am using that drive and cannot reformat. I didn't see any jumpers on the ssd, but I guess I didn't check on the stock drive, either.
Thanks again,
Matt
Philip_Yip
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December 6th, 2014 16:00
You have Windows installed on both the HDD and on the SSD? i.e. a dual boot?
You can disconnect the SSD and use DBAN to wipe the HDD.
http://dellwindowsreinstallationguide.com/securely-wipe-your-hard-drive-with-dariks-boot-and-nuke-dban/
If Windows is installed on the HDD and not on the SSD. Remove the HDD and then use the Dell Backup and Recovery USB to install Windows onto the SSD. Then check that it boots.
After that power down and remove the SSD and then insert the HDD. Securely wipe it with DBAN. Then after that's done insert the SSD back in place.
You will then be able to launch Windows (on the SSD) and use disk management to assign the HDD a partition.