Thinking of wiping my HD

DJ Life & Community General Discussion
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Thinking of wiping my HD

There’s comes a time in every man’s life (and every woman’s life, I’d assume), when it’s necessary to wipe your hard drive clean and get your computer back to the quick, clean state it was in when you bought it. And that time for me is now… I’m leaving for school in 10 days (!!)

After a year of sometimes random downloads, my HD is pretty bogged down with useless programs and music. I have a ton of stuff that I don’t need and don’t want.

Of course, the downside to this is that I have loads of music and other stuff that I need to hang on to. I have about +/- 20GB of music. Maybe 1GB of pictures and other personal stuff… Everything else I need I can just download and reinstall again.

So what is the cheapest and most pain-free way of going about this. My laptop has a DVD-RW (which I embarrassingly have never used and don’t know how to use really). So I was thinking about going out and buying some blank DVD’s and just burning what I really want to hang on to.

Is there an easier way of doing this, or am I pretty much better off with this method? I thought about buying an external HD, but to be honest I don’t want to spend the money.

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maybe you could borrow a friend’s drive. Burning DVDs can be a PITA for backing up unless you have some automated backup program for it…I don’t so..meh.
That’s why I keep an external handy.
Hopefully you can do a clean install w/o some manufacture’s disk load with crap. You have ten days. Just do it a DVD at a time if you wish but make sure that your disks are validated after burning. I usually reformat twice a year and always double check to make sure I copied everything over.
Also be sure to disconnect any external drive if installing XP and up. I recently wiped an external as the installer thought it was teh system disk. That really sucked but fortunately was able to restore all my music downloads. Losta ll my movies though (pr0n) lol.

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When you have backed up everything, partition your HD when you reinstall your OS. Have a system partition and a data partition. Then next time you need to do this you just copy anything you want to keep from your system partition to the data partition and then just wipe the system one…

I’d also highly recommend using something like Norton Ghost to take an image of your clean freshly installed system partition. That way next time you want to wipe everything it will take about 3 minutes to get a nice clean install rather than several hours…

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dvds are time consuming, get an external hd and back everything up on that. I actually copy all my music and other important things over to mine every month or so, it takes a while at first but it’s worth it.

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Re: Thinking of wiping my HD

The hell with DVDs! Just get a ext HD and xfer all ur junk over. Like it was said in a prv post, when you do a clean install make 2 partitions. C: will be OS D: will be all ur junk. Just make a folder for ur music, pix, video, and downloads. So in the future if you have to reinstall the OS you don’t run into the same problem. Plus I would recommend to get a ext and back ups of ur C: & D:

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Exteernal Hard Drive. Get a frerinds PC hook up network between them. Trasnfer files

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I back up everything once a week onto my seagate terrordrive. so if the pc does poo itself i’m still sweet. Losing alll my tunes that time was pretty gutting but never again lol. I think DVD’s are good for program setups, stuff like that, but not for tunes, too much hassle

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Agrees with JesC.

I am a fan of cleaning/wiping HDD. I usually do this on a half to yearly basis. Sometimes shorter. :smiley:

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Just think about the reason why you don’t play certain songs. :wink:

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hey

yeah echoing what everyone says I also wipe my PC’s fairly regularly, every 6 months to a year, so yeah it defo helps.

Some tips:

USE AN EXTERNAL DRIVE!!! you should really have one anyway with all your music and docs backed up on it so that if the HD in your main drive fails you don’t loose everything. But yeah this is the perfect time to copy everything over and then copy it back on, and then you’ll have your backup in case your main drive fails.

MAKE SURE YOU CAN GET ON THE NET: It really is best practice to make sure that before you wipe and do the re-install you have copies of all of the disks that you will need, with all your software (office/word, DJ & music software and whatever else you usually use) and all your drivers for your video card/sound card/printer/scanner/webcam and whatever other devices you use. However most of these can be fixed alright AS LONG AS YOU CAN GET ON THE NET ONCE YOU REINSTALL. so make sure you have any disks/software/drivers/passwords/dialers etc that you need to hook back up to the net.

CREATE 2 PARTITIONS: As people have said, when your going through the options and setting things up, create two partitions on the disk, C and D. put windows and all your programs onto C, and save all your documents and music onto D. That means if you ever have to reinstall again you only have to wipe C and dont have to worry about your documents they will be safe on D (although you should be backing them up to your external HD anyway. You have been warned :stuck_out_tongue: )

GHOST: Once you have reinstalled windows and all your software, installed all your drivers and everything else, use something like Norton Ghost or one of the free alternatives to make an image of your C drive and save it to your external drive. This way should you decide to wipe again you only have to copy over your fresh just installed and set up image rather than doing the whole thing from scratch, and so it only takes about 20 mins from start to finish rather than the whole night :slight_smile:

k

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+1 on that matter!

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tekki’s trying to reach 4k :smiley: or ADD meds ran out…:wink:

My only thing to add is you should also back up your external backup drive, they are also known to fail, i recall reading somewhere that external drives fail more often then internal but who knows…

it’s also an ideal time to leave space for a linux partition…ArtistX is a good DAW distro based on ubuntu with just about every audio program available in linux.

also recommend ghosting your current setup so that if something doesn’t go right you at the very least can recover your current setup.

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Check it out. download Windows Ultimate 7, if your going to do it illegally there’s no way to stop you but make sure you also download block windows wat, genuine validation, and a OME key activator or your at serious risk when windows updates, i mention them cause don’t want to feel responsible for anyone’s loss…

place EVERYTHING you want to back up in your current default “my documents” folder

download PowerISO to burn Windows on a blank dvd its usually 2.4 gigs (back up the other stuff if illegally downloading on a different disc)

restart and run the windows set up, select “custom installation” it says it deletes all your files but i promise iv done this to ten computers, it just hides them for you to delete later (if your steeling it uncheck the: activate automatically the first time you go online box and select to not automatically update, and leave the serial key blank, leaving the key blank gives you a 30 day trial, or 30 days to run the other stuff you downloaded)

okay now that you have 7 go to “computer” > windows.old > users > “whatever your user name was” > documents

now you’ll se everything from your previous windows! drag everything to its new location.

you’ll need to re install your programs, sorry i forgot to mention so also back up your product keys, setups (if not on discs) and TSI type files.

(if illegal run the three programs selecting your pc brand for the OEM one)

go to download.com and download/install Avira free anti virus
as well as ccleaner.com download/install it and select it to “wipe free space clean”

redownload all your programs, import your settings, and songs
make sure before you disc clean up you re allocated all your song in itunes default folder on your new windows located: music > itunes > itunes media > music

when everything is said and done go to disc clean up located: start > all programs > accessories > system tools > disc clean up

you will have a new option “clean up previous versions of windows” this typically cleans 20+gigs after a new installation!!

i would say to everyone interested in cleaning your HD kill two birds with one stone and also upgrade!

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Continuity above all, I always say. :wink: