[deliriumcolor]

I have a Gateway , pentium 3 using Windows ME that got totally messed up a couple years back due to a major virus attack and much malware (this figured out after dealing with the same problems now, only now learning how to protect my new pc). Well my hubby wants to use the computer. You turn it on and it will immediately go into safe mode. One time, prior to this, I had a virus and the support people told me to write zeros to my hard drive and install all my software. WEll, I want to do this to this computer. I still have all the software. I just don't remember how to write the zeros. I need someone to walk me through it step by step. All help is very much appreciated.

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What brand of drive is it? You may be able to go to the mfrs website and download software that you can use to fix or maintain your drive. I know that Maxtor and Western Digital have downloadable software that you can use to write a drive to zeros. You can probably find some free software using Google that would do that.

[Tyger]

What brand of drive is it? You may be able to go to the mfrs website and download software that you can use to fix or maintain your drive. I know that Maxtor and Western Digital have downloadable software that you can use to write a drive to zeros. You can probably find some free software using Google that would do that.

[Redwontdo]

When you say you still have all the software, what software do you mean? Do you have a specific utility for wiping the drive? What is the name of it?

[deliriumcolor]

Tyger-

You know, I cannot remember what kind it is. My husband brought me the CPU and it dosen't say. All I can remember is it is a Gateway purchased around 2000, that's why we had winME on it.

I will go to those websites and take a look. Thanks for the advice.

Jamica

[deliriumcolor]

Redwontdo,

I have all the software that originally came with the computer. All the stuff that they put on the computer before the shipped it to me like the OS. I also have 3 disks that are called System Restoration Kit, but as I remember, these didn't quite work last time. I also have a floppy called basic rescue boot and another ha is windows ME startup disk.

And no, I have no software for wiping the drive, I think. Unless you know that any that I mentioned above will do it.

Just for all of your information I am totally computer illiterate.

Thanks for the help,

Jamica

[Redwontdo]

Redwontdo,

I have all the software that originally came with the computer. All the stuff that they put on the computer before the shipped it to me like the OS. I also have 3 disks that are called System Restoration Kit, but as I remember, these didn't quite work last time. I also have a floppy called basic rescue boot and another ha is windows ME startup disk.

And no, I have no software for wiping the drive, I think. Unless you know that any that I mentioned above will do it.

Just for all of your information   I am totally computer illiterate.

Thanks for the help,

Jamica

Well as far as I know you need a software to totally format the drive back to 1010101. I use Boot Nuke, but honestly if you are not used to doing things like that you'd be better to get some help, or wait for one of the whiz'z here to talk you through it.

[peterm]

why do you want to wrie 00000 to your drive
if you have nothing on it you want just reformat

[Tyger]

why do you want to wrie 00000 to your drive
if you have nothing on it you want just reformat

This is something a lot of people don't understand. Deleting and formatting don't remove all information from a drive. They only tell the disk operating system that this block can be written to, but if you look with the right software you can find the original deleted or formatted over file. And some parts of the disk, some file types can't be removed by either method. I had a disk about a month ago that wouldn't operate properly, someone had installed win98 over a disk that had an image burned to it, and the image would pop up and slow the system down. It was fixed by writing to zeros and works well now.

[peterm]

Yes I understand what it is
It is called low level format or Initialization
It just you don't see it to often these days. It is how we had to set up hard drives
way back in the begining on XT type computers
suggest you read this as you need to know the map to write the bad sectors to
Low level format tips
or if you really want to this free download will do the trick.
kill disk

Edited by peterm, 05 July 2005 - 02:05 AM.

[deliriumcolor]

I actually tried killdisk but it didn't work. When I booted up the comp in safe mode an error message informed me that there were many files in the registry that were not found. I got it to safe mode but it just stayed on the screen where it says safe mode in all four corners and nothing else came up. Not the start button, not the desktop. I couldn't type anything in the computer ( and I didn't have a mouse). I turned off the pc. put the kill disk in and booted again. nothing happend. just the same messages. I couldn't type in for the disk to run and it didn't run. So, in the end I told my husband since I didn't know a dang thing about computers then if he really wanted this pos up and running so badly then he needed to safe up some money to get a geek in here to actually put their hands on it and do what needs to be done.

Jamica

[peterm]

can you tell us what make and model of hard drive look in the documentation
that came with the computer