UBCD5 - Can Windows7 be wiped with it?

[ranchhand]

I was installing Windows7 Ultra on a hard drive, but I wanted to wipe the old Windows 7 OS off of it first. I thought I would experiment to see what I could learn, so for the Halibut I booted with UBCD 5.x, and manually deleted all the W7 files off the drive. When I was done everything was gone. Rebooted, removed the UBCD disk and checked the drive. The system was still there! Has anyone had this experience? Maybe just a glitch (?).

[redwudz]

What did you use to wipe the disk? Fdisk or one of the partition utilities would work better that just deleting the files, though that should have worked. Maybe UBCD didn't want to remove protected system files?

Generally, I use the W7 boot disk and delete all existing partitions, repartition and reformat, then install the new OS. Otherwise you could end up with 'w7.old' taking up disk space.

Unless you have sensitive data you need to remove from a HDD, I would just repartition it.

If you need to keep other files on the HDD, you could do the 'upgrade' install, then delete the .old folder. But I would usually recommend a clean install. (Repartition/reformat.)

[ranchhand]

Hi Red... yeah, that is how I usually do it, but I like to experiment. W7 has some real protection on it-I have tried to remove certain files and sometimes it errors me and won't allow, and Windows isn't even booted!! I have partitioned and formatted in NTFS using UBCD, I have even partitioned and fomatted my USB sticks with NTFS and it worked super. Ok, I'm gonna try this again tonight just to make sure. I will let you know what happens. Hmmmmm - I wonder if Knoppix would fare better? This is interesting.

[Nelson37]

When you say "the system was still there" did it actually boot or did the install disk say it recognized a previous Windows installation?

[ranchhand]

Hi Nelson... no, the entire system was there. I did it again last night after work, and this time it nuked everything. I must have glitched something the first time I tried, but it immediately nuked everything with no problems. I reinstalled W7/64 and it's running fine. Interesting experiment, I never know when something like that can come in handy!