Cleaning a laptop

dig deep

dig deep

Prince of Birthdays
Staff member
My Satellite Setup
Dream7020 and AZ Elite and a few DM800
My Location
Sweden
A good tool for cleaning a win 7 lappie.

Need to boot from a stick and a powerful format/disk cleaning program ?

It´s the Asus again lol Lots of old windows files from original 7 and the w10 that didn´t work and also an old
w8.1 so it is messy. Loved Fdisk but it is not working nowdays.

Anyone ?
 
I use a USB to hard drive interface, I plug it in to one of my PC's I have setup for diagnostics and then remove the hard drive from the unit under test, then I can do what ever I need to do to it, scan it, clean it or format it.

Here is another option, make a boot-able USB stick or CD with this program on it.

Code: 
http://www.hirensbootcd.org/download/
 
It loads a mini XP platform into the systems RAM, you can then do what you need to do to the hard drive.
 
I use a program called Hard Disk Sentinel ...though I'm not sure if the free version is fully functional within it's trial period ..
It _would_ require installation on another PC/OS ..then the target drive attached as a slave ..
It can though perform what is referred to as read/write drive surface re-initialisation test ...
Which basically interrogates the HD for errors and not only reads the sectors but writes zeros first ...
Thus destroying ANY data ..but in the process confirming all sectors are good ..
If it finds any bad ones it will mark that sector for immediate or later disablement ..and bring into use the 'spare' sectors/clusters ...put aside by the drive manufacturer for just such future damage ...
A very nice ...very useful bit of kit ..
The fully operational Pro version is about £20 for one license ...but is a tool I'm happy to endorse ..and has ressurected for me a few drives that have had errors..
Having said all that ...it is more than you need or asked for ..I guess ..
BUT does allow for a very low level wipe of all data ..and restores the drive to factory condition as far as I'm aware ..
Blank ...full of zeros ..no partitions ...no data ..

Performed the re-initialisation test and restored a 3TB Toshiba Sata a few week back ..after a major corruption of the GPT linux partion on it ..
Damaged data/file structure..and found 2 damaged sectors ..
One restored immediately ..and on sector tagged as 'a potential failure for the future' ..
The drive is dow in use again ...having been factory re-set ..re-formatted in Freenas ..and no longer showing any errors..
Took over 6 hours though to 'flip' all the bits of the drive surface..
rgds
VS
 
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Thank You guys.
I used the w7 install program and cleaned the hd - worked fine.
I will have a look at what You have suggested, cold be nice to have when it´s time to clean out w10
 
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