How to get rid of all Windows xp files on a hard drive?

Resolved question

by mspadorchard - 9/21/12 2:31 PM

I have a dell about 2004 vintage, with xp on it. Two drives, one, lets call it C drive, with xp working well. The other with a corrupt xp file somewhere that refuses to boot, lets call it drive F. I am not able to identify the corrupt file. (I am not an expert...)

Drive C works and boots fine... So I would like to get rid of all the operating system files on drive F. Is it better or easier to do this task from a C drive Windows xp boot, or a Ubunto Boot from a flash drive?

Either way, how can I be assured to find all the xp files that are now of no use?

All drives and hardware appear to be working well... i purposely put the xp OS on each drive a few years ago so as to make it possible top switch drives when the startup drive OS got messed up... which with Windows seems to happen sooner or later, right?

My plan is to eventually put XP back on the F drive for the same reason, IF I can do so without having to reformat the whole drive and loose data. (Backup is done as far as I can tell... but frankly, I don't trust a backup program to properly do so without losing data... and would prefer not to risk it... ). My backups were done by me manually...

I have purchased a used windows seven system and may put the F drive in that as a secondary drive in order to access the old files I have on F drive... rather than do a file transfer to the new computer system. To my way of thinking it would be smart to get rid of any old OS files on that F drive... before installing it.

Thanks,

M.