Hi, I have an HP Pavilion TV m7674x that is flooded with viruses. I wonder if
you could tell me how to scrub the hard drive before I reinstall windows. I have
the option to do system recovery but that does not completely get rid of all the
old and corrupted files there may still be. Thanks for your time and effort!

It’s always a great idea to completely wipe the hard drive before you load on a new operating system especially if you had on many corrupt files.? The format option that is prompted during a Windows installation usually just wipes and masks over the old drive, but does not completely wipe and write “zeros” to the drive.

Let’s look at some steps to wipe out your disk before you reinstall any operating system.

There are a number of options to completely format a hard drive before reinstalling Windows. The first thing you need to check (before you begin) is that you have the installation media for your version of Windows. As this will be wiping the hard drive completely, you won’t be able to recover the operating system from the recovery partition on the hard drive – it will be wiped and will no longer exist!

Once you have the installation media, you’ll need to download and burn a disc with the DBAN program on it. Darik’s Boot and Nuke is a bootable disc which will wipe completely all hard drives it finds connected to the computer, so it needs to be used with the greatest of care!

Download the latest DBAN iso file from here. You will then need to burn the iso file as an image to a blank CD. If you don’t know how to do this, there is a small guide here on our forums!

Once you have the CD burned with DBAN, put it in the drive of the computer you want to wipe and boot up the computer. Follow the onscreen instructions to completely wipe the hard drive. You are able to set it to run a number of passes, and it actually will take a long time (possibly overnight or longer for a single pass).

After the program has completed its process, you should be able to install the desired version of Windows onto your newly cleaned and fresh hard drive!

*Credit for this solution goes to: Troy. Classroom Teacher in our forums.