Erasing Hard Drive help needed

[TEAK36]

I think the data on my laptop hard drive is corrupt. I tried using the restore discs that came with the laptop,but the laptop gets to the windows logo screen and then reboots.Even when I try to use safe mode, the screen just locks up.I am sure it is my hard drive because I took one from another laptop and it works fine in the laptop I am trying to restore.I would now like to try and erase the corrupt hard drive, but have no idea how to do this..There seems to be loads of programs capable of erasing hard drives, and I assume that I have to make some sort of bootable disc,but I dont know how to make a bootable disc either.Any help would be most appreciated.I have Nero insalled if this is of any help.

[vehelpfulguy]

You do not need to erase your hard disk before doing a restore as the restore will overwrite everything anyway.

But if you are doing a restore you need to make sure your laptop is booting from the CD drive rather than the hard disk.

Usually a laptop or PC have a boot order, the order of places where it looks for an operating system(Windows). It can either be on the diskette, or on a CD, or on a hard disk.

If you have your hard disk above the CD in the boot order it will always try to boot from your hard disk rather than your CD.

This order can be changed in your laptop. Your laptop documentation will tell you how change this.You may need to go into something called the BIOS.

Basically put the CD drive first in the list, the hard disk second and the diskette (if there) third.

With the laptop ON put the CD in the drive, turn the laptop OFF, then ON again. You may now get a message saying "Do you want to boot from CD" (this may only stay there a few seconds).

You reply "yes" and the recovery should start.

At the end remove the CD, and reboot the laptop and the laptop should now ignore the CD drive (because there is not one in there) and boot from the hard disk.

Good luck

[Ralph]

You can go here and download a file to make a bootdisk. There's instructions on how to make the bootdisk a little down the page. Any of them will do really, they don't have to match the version of windows you've already got installed. Personally, I'd go for Win98 SE as it was the last version of windows to be based on MS-DOS.

When you've made the boot floppy, leave it in the drive and reboot. If it doesn't boot from the floppy, you'll have to change the boot order in the BIOS so that it does. After it's booted, you'll have A:\ with the cursor flashing, type "format c:" without the quotes and hit Enter. It'll ask you if you're sure, you'll need to be 'cos it's irreversible but you knew that already!

When it's done its job, pop out the floppy, pop in the restore CD, reboot and restore your OS to a squeaky clean drive. Good luck.