I’m trying to donate two of my lap taps. One of them is barely used but has a trojan virus, the other one doesn’t have any virus but I’d still like to erase the hard drive. My questions are:
1. How do I completely erase my hard drive?
2. If I erase the hard drive of the infected computer, will it also get rid of the virus?
3. Can I erase the hard drive by myself or must I have a computer technician do this for me?
Any information would be greatly appreciated!
Oh, they’re both Dell laptops if that helps.
Yes, erasing the drive will remove the virus.
How to: Well, two ways come to mind….
one is to use Dell’s utility partition, which should be invoked by using the F12 button when powering up. This will allow you to select the utility partition, if it only shows a diagnostic partition you should try it and see if it has a setting to erase (doubt it). If it only had the diagnostic option, or neither, then you should have a DELL recovery CD/DVD. By inserting this, and using the F12 to boot from the CD/DVD you should be able to ‘reinstall’ Windows and the computer back to the state it was in when you bought it (assuming new). It MAY have the option, in this recovery process, to delete or format the drive prior to the actual reinstall. If so, then after it reformats or allows you to delete the partition, turn it off. Just don’t let it do the actual reinstall.
Option two is better (IMGO) download DBAN (link below). You need to do this from a working computer, and use it to burn the files as instructed to a CD. Then insert it in the lappy to be donated, use the F12 button again to boot to the CD. Use pretty much any of the erasure methods to totally clean the drive.
1a) OPEN MY COMPUter
b) right click the drive and click on format
2) not sure
3) you can erase it yourself.