how do i wipe a hard drive

im sorry if this is already answered but im just wondering how you would completely wipe a hard drive cause i keep getting this like 8mb like hard drive partition and i think its like a virus or something i am trying to get my windows xp installed on it with partitions and along with linux and that is causing an error please someone help me

 

Or is it the 8MB buffer that is a part of the HDD?

 

it might be i have no idea what it is its a 200gb maxtor hard drive

 

So this happens when you're trying to create partitions while booting off the XP CD? If that's the case, I've had it happen before to me and everything has worked fine...

And if you aren't installing XP with at least SP1 (or is it 1a?) the full 200GB of your hard drive may not be recognized. Possibly only 137GB will be recognized. This issue has been covered in the forums before, maybe a search will reveal the solution if it does happen to you.

 

Try DBAN, insert floppy and restart, type autonuke for complete hdd erase, setting all bits back to zero.

Only works on IDE disks

Download dban here