OEM w7 and a drive wipe

[meg]

I have now installed OEM W7 into my 2 home desktops (one a new build, one my old Dell XPS 410). As a housekeeping measure, I like to do an annual drive wipe, just to clear out the dust bunnies on the system. I hope this won't be a future problem, will it? OR will I have to call Microsoft to get it OK'd?

thanks

[RickyTick]

This shouldn't be a problem at all.

"You can reinstall Windows 7 using Recovery in Control Panel, under Advanced recovery methods. This method reinstalls Windows 7, either from a recovery image provided by your computer manufacturer, or from your original Windows 7 installation files. You need to reinstall all of the programs that you added, and restore all of your files from a backup."
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows7/Installing-and-reinstalling-Windows-7

[meg]

Thanks, that should work fine.

[Deneb]

The purpose of wiping a hard disk is to make all the data on it utterly unrecoverable. Normally this is a good idea if you’re going to give away a computer say to charity for the tax advantage or sell it. Otherwise the only two reasons would be if you routinely have data on your hard drive that you need to keep private or if you manage to foul up the master boot record (MBR) so badly you can’t get an operating system to load.

Darik's Boot and Nuke is a great little utility that you can boot off a CD and do a full wipe of the hard drive utterly overwriting everything including the master boot record. Be fully aware that this will also overwrite the hidden partition so you won’t have the ability to restore Windows from the hard drive.

Darik's Boot and Nuke

DBAN 2.2.6 download:
http://www.dban.org/download

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DBAN (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DBAN)

If on the other hand you just want a utility to wipe the empty hard drive space here are two:

Clean Disk Security
http://download.cnet.com/Clean-Disk-Security/3000-2092_4-10052111.html?tag=mncol;2

Eraser
http://sourceforge.net/projects/eraser

If you want to just reinstall Windows to have a clean Windows installation, you could use the Gparted partition utility from a Ubuntu install disc to just format the petition or partitions that Windows uses. Be careful not to delete or format the hidden partition at the front of the drive. Also note that some manufacturers using other partition for utilities. Then reinstall Windows.

Another cool utility is Macrium Reflect Free. It has the ability to backup the contents of the entire hard disk including the hidden partitions to DVD blanks with compression. It also allows you to create a self booting restore disk. It is a good idea to use this to do a full backup of a new system or a system you have just restored.

Macrium Reflect Free
http://download.cnet.com/Macrium-Reflect-Free/3000-2242_4-10845728.html?tag=mncol;1