Hard Drive question

[draybook]

Is there any way to totally wipe a hard drive without being able to enter set up? In other words, can I set it as my slave drive and wipe it somehow from my other drive?

The problem is that the HD I'm trying to wipe isn't recognized for some reason. I had it running last night but when I rebooted, the pc failed to recognize it. Even this pc won't recognize it for some reason. It says, "disk read error".

[flynnibus]

Yes, you can do several things

- boot a utility disk from any of the major vendors (some are keyed to their own drives though)
- connect the HD as a secondary drive and then just use normal utilities on it from within windows/osx

Connect it as a slave, boot up windows, then run the disk management application. Select the drive, and chose to format it low level.

[draybook]

Strange. I put it in this pc and tried all of the settings with the little piece in the prong area(not sure what to call it). Every time I loaded up it wouldn't read either HD. Took it out and this HD loads right up.

[ni_teach]

Many HD have jumpers (Pins in the back) and you must set them to either Master, slave or cable select. To make sure that the pins are correct double check these from the website or paperwork of the HD maker.

[draybook]

Yeah, I tried all 3 settings to no avail. The night I got it to work it was set as the slave drive.