SOLVED [HELP] Remove the recovery partition from an old hard drive.

[ClutchHunter]

^^ Title.

Trying to completely erase an old hard drive. Windows 7. It's (obviously) not my primary storage device however it is an internal SATA drive.

Can't do it within Disk Management as Windows seems to think it's still an important partition.





Is there any software that can remove this partition from within Windows? Or any software that can just completely wipe the entire drive? Thanks.

 

[DarrenP]

Your best bet is to remember what partition it is, Insert your windows disk such as the OEM disk that came with it. Go into the bios and hit disk drive as boot disk. and from there put your disk in. and it'll ask you where you want to install, just delete the partitions you don't want by selecting them and hitting "D" key. and they'll delete than just cancel the install... that's the best thing i can think of.

 

[EarthDog]

You want the CD/DVD ROM as the primary boot device, THEN a disk drive.. note.

 

[DarrenP]

Well a disk drive to me is an ODD because that's what it always was, if i say Hard drive it's an HDD.

 

[ClutchHunter]

My bad for not being clear.

OS and everything is on an SSD. Not touching this. Old stuff from old computer has already been raided for important files on a HDD. The problem is with the latter.

 

[txus.palacios]

Parted Magic is the way to go. Burn that to a disk / copy it to USB drive / add it to your PXE server.

Then use gparted to wipe that drive. It is easy, you don't need to understand Linux at all for that. For safety, remove your SSD though and triple check before deleting.

 

[ClutchHunter]

Is there nothing that can do this within Windows? It seems like if you wanted to just wipe a hard drive completely ignoring all partitions it should be possible?

 

[redduc900]

Sure, you can use the Diskpart utility. Type diskpart into the Start search field, right-click diskpart.exe and select "Run as administrator". Then at the DISKPART> prompt type list disk. Post the results in this thread.

 

[ClutchHunter]

 

[txus.palacios]

"remove" removes mountpoints.
"delete" deletes partitions.
remove != delete

 

[ClutchHunter]

Ah, that did it!

Specifically "delete partition override" worked Thanks!