The following steps are intended to help you prepare a machine to be surplussed, by overwriting all data and free space on each functioning hard drive attached to the machine. These instructions are intended for machines that are still functioning properly. If you computer is malfunctioning and you cannot access one or more of the hard drives, then before you surplus the machine you may want to have someone remove the hard drive from the machine and use other methods to assure that data cannot be retrieved from the drive. The following steps may or may not work for servers (with special hard drive configurations such as RAID) or some machines with SCSI type hard drives.

For DOS or Windows (95, 98, ME, NT, 2000, XP):

1. Backup all files you want to keep before continuing.
    
2. Boot from a floppy diskette that will recognize fat 32 partitions.
   1. Obtain a blank floppy diskette (usually a 1.44MB, 3.5" HD diskette).
   2. If you have pure DOS (no Windows) or Windows 3.x, Windows NT, Windows 2000, or Windows XP, please obtain a boot diskette and corresponding utilities by locating a machine with one of the Windows operating systems outlined in the next step.
   3. Locate a computer which you may use to create the bootdisk. Although a computer running Windows 98 is preferred for making the boot diskette, if you are running or have access to a machine with Windows 95 or Windows ME, you may proceed without locating a computer that is running Windows 98.
   4. To create a bootable diskette for your machine using the Windows 95, 98, or ME operating system, insert the blank diskette, go to the Windows 'Start' button, then select 'settings', 'control panel', 'add / remove programs', ‘startup disk’ tab, ‘create disk’ button.
      • If you are using Windows ME (Millennium) to make the boot diskette, you may also need to copy the "format" program onto the diskette. To do this, double-click on the icon called 'My Computer', double-click on your 'C' drive, double-click on the 'windows' folder, double-click on the 'command' folder, right click on the file called 'format', and select 'send to floppy'.
         
3. Delete all partitions, and create a single partition to span the entire hard drive.
   1. Reboot your machine to the floppy diskette you just created.
   2. If you are prompted with a boot menu, select to 'boot without cdrom support'.
   3. At the command prompt (ex: A:\), type “fdisk” and press enter.
   4. If you are asked, choose ‘Yes’ to enable large disk support.
   5. If you are prompted about an NTFS partition, choose 'Yes'. If this does not seem to work, exit and restart fdisk, choosing 'No' for this step.
   6. In fdisk, use menu item #3 to delete all partitions. If they exist, you should delete partitions in this order: Non-dos partitions, then logical drives in extended partitions, then Extended partition, then Primary partitions, until fdisk says that no drive letters or partitions exist. You may have more than one of each type of partition. You should continue trying to delete each type of partition until fdisk tells you there are no more of that type. Then try the next type.
   7. In fdisk, use menu item #1 to create a single primary partition that uses 100% of all free space on the drive.
   8. In fdisk, at the main menu, if you have more than one fixed disk drive (same as a hard drive), then you will also have fdisk menu item #5 which you should use to switch fixed disks and perform these steps again for EACH fixed disk in your system.
   9. If, at the MAIN menu of fdisk, you do not have a menu item #5, then you only have one fixed disk drive recognized by your system.
   10. When you are finished with the steps above, return to the fdisk Main Menu and press the 'ESC' key to exit fdisk.
   11. If fdisk does not prompt you to reboot, then once you have returned from fdisk to the command prompt (A:\), manually reboot your machine before continuing with the next steps.
        
4. Format the new partition, using the “unconditional” formatting option.
   1. At the DOS prompt, issue the command (see next step) for each hard drive letter on your machine. Depending on the size of your hard drive and the speed of your system, each drive letter may take several minutes to an hour to complete. A progress percentage indicator should appear to help you gauge how long the erase will take.
   2. Start with the command "format c: /u" (without the quotes)
   3. When the format is finished, retype the command, using the next drive letter (d:). Use "format d: /u" (without the quotes)
   4. After each format is finished, continue alphabetically advancing the drive letter (E:, F:, G:, etc ) until you get an error message that the drive letter does not exist.
       
5. Remove all floppies and CDROMS from the machine.
   1. If you no longer have power to the system and therefore cannot eject your CDROM, there is often a tiny hole just under the drive door opening. Insert a paperclip into this hole to manually eject the CDROM. You may have to slowly pull the tray open to get the CD out, and carefully push it closed again when you are done.
       
6. Surplus the machine.
   1. (Don't forget to report the surplus to your department's inventory tracking person)

If you are having trouble with this page...you probably can't read this and any contact information I put here would be useless.

Return to regular view	Text-only	Updated: 2/13/2007