Should I zero the hardrive first?

[laurence91]

Hi All,

After a few months of using WUBI I am taking the plunge and dual booting my M1530 with Kubuntu starting from the media direct key, i must say its taken quite a while to gain all the knowledge and nessecary courage to undertake this work which i would reccomend to anybody thinking of it.

However there is one thing still on my mind, should i zero the hardrive to begin with before starting?

Im going for a vista and kubuntu dual boot with a 50gb data drive, i have all the guides i can find and am quite confident about all the seps apart from the first... it says to insert the meda direct disc and sort out the partition table and that this step wipes your drive but im quite keen on zeroing the drive first from what iv read about data still being on the drive if you only format.

What do you think? can anyone see a problem with this idea?

Cheers

Laurence

[finer recliner]

as long as you understand that formating and writing all zeros to a drive means you will lose all of your current files, then you can do it. It isn't necessary to write zeros to your drive, but it definitely won't hurt. Seeing as you are going to continue to use the drive after the reformat (rather than throwing it away), you'll be happy to know that even if you dont zero out the drive, you'll be overwriting your previous data the more often you use the drive over time. So I really wouldnt worry about writing zeros.

just make sure that you install windows before installing ubuntu if you're going for a dual boot to avoid boot manager problems.

[laurence91]

Thanks for you reply.

Laurence

[SpaceMaster]

Zeroing is usually not necessary. If you were to get rid of an old harddrive, and didn't want prying eyes to see what you had stored on it, zeroing is the bread-and-butter of data security.

If you're just reusing one of your own drives, it shouldn't matter. Repartitioning the drive should be all you need to do in that case.