Formatting your hard drive

alwite lads.
my brother wants to get a new laptop and we just sold his old one on the ebay. the buyer wishes to make payment in collection and i havent replied back to her yet as i need to know how to format the hard drive for the old laptop, so that the disk is pretty much clean and ready for a fresh windows install. right now its got an illegal version of windows 7 on it and i want to get this off and avoid taking legal risks. i said in the description that the disk's been formatted and has no OP on it, buyer has read and acknowledged this and said its ok. i just need to know how to do it.
does anyone here know how to do it on win7?
alternatively, i was thinking of physically taking the hard drive out, connect it to my laptop via usb and formatting it that way, and then putting it back in the old laptop. i have the box required to put the hard drive in, of which is also used to connect to another computer by usb. all data on the old laptop's been moved/backed up on a flash drive (not much, only the essentials, he's not bothered about the rest);
suggestions? recommendations?
cheers.

http://pcsupport.about.com/od/windows7/s...torial.htm

(01-02-2012 00:41 )a_j216 Wrote:  suggestions? recommendations?

Maybe you should have done some research before selling it to someone under false pretenses?

If I need to format an operating drive I usually take it out change the pins back to secondary, and then plug into another computer and format it from there. Removing all partitions in the process.

Download a .iso file for SystemRescueCd and burn it to CD
Full details are here http://www.sysresccd.org/Main_Page
Boot your PC from this CD instead of from the hard drive, and use the GParted program to delete/create/format or whatever you want to, with any of the Windows partitions on your PC hard drive.

Yup, you can't do it using the OS on the drive as you are obviously going to be wiping that out during the format, you either need to take the drive out and mount it in another pc and format, or boot into a livecd (or usb stick) and use that OS to format the drive.

As well as the sysresc The Watcher mentions, there is also a more basic gparted you can use : http://gparted.sourceforge.net/livecd.php

This can be burnt to cd or follow the instructions to install to usb stick.

Pendrive linux also offers a nice installer that will download and install a whole number of linux distros onto a usb stick : http://www.pendrivelinux.com/universal-u...-as-1-2-3/

munch

(02-02-2012 13:35 )munch1917 Wrote:  Yup, you can't do it using the OS on the drive as you are obviously going to be wiping that out during the format.

munch

Actually, there is a way to format the drive whilst it's still your main OS drive. But it's not something I would recomend unless you know what your doing.

You close down windows, and use dos to format it. But like I said, not to be used unless you really know what you are doing.

(02-02-2012 13:56 )aceman65 Wrote:  Actually, there is a way to format the drive whilst it's still your main OS drive. But it's not something I would recomend unless you know what your doing.

You close down windows, and use dos to format it. But like I said, not to be used unless you really know what you are doing.

Yeah I did wonder about that, but not something I've had to do anytime recently, so thought best not to mention it, probably far easier to use the gparted livecd/usb stick method

munch

Each computer should come with a disk to restore it to its shipped state.

.