hdd cleanup

I have a 80gb hdd, that I am trying to put in another computer. I have run killadisk, but, there is still 5.5gb of data on drive that keeps looking for the old computer and software, and will not let me load anything on it.
How do I clean up this drive from these hidden files, so I can start over. It does not show any partitions, but, there has to be a hidden one there some place.
Tom Loger

 

You can use anything but Windows install disk to partition the harddisk into one big one and nothing else. Windows always leaves a few gigs behind. 8 in most cases.

There are tools that do a good job at partitioning. The good ones are not free. The free ones can be downloaded from the harddisk's manufacturer site under support.

 

If you ran KillDisk and there is still information on the disk, either you didn't run KillDisk properly, or the hard disk itself is beyond "normal software repair".

Download and run the hard disk manufacturers utilities on the hard disk. You can "zero-fill" the disk and then set it up (if you choose) with the utilities (partition and format) provided. If the disk checks out OK, you can let the O/S Setup do the partitioning and formatting of the disk. (Usually recommended.)

Hard Disk Analysis & Setup Tools - Major Manufacturers

 

All hard drives do not show up as their labeled capacities. For example: I have a 250gb hard drive. In it's fully clean, unformatted, departitioned state, it's capacity is 232gb. The architecture of storage devices and interfaces uses approximately 7gb per 100gb for parities, allocation tables, and other technical stuff; you will NEVER get 80gb of data on an 80gb hard drive. I will NEVER get 250gb of data on my 250gb hard drive. There was a time when Western Digital made 45gb drives so the user could store 40gb of data; Hitachi made 86gb drives so you could store almost 80gb of data.... If your 80gb shows about 73-75gb free, then it is clean, and there is no hidden data. As stated above, if you ran KillDisk, then it should not be trying to boot into some mystery data unless the drive is faulty, or KillDisk wasn't run correctly. I guess there is a chance that the drive has a factory recovery partition on it from the Dell or HP factory, but these generally do not try to boot on their own without any input from the user.