I have Question about an old Dell Harddrive

Ryan5091

First of all i hope i got this in the right place i couldn't decide if this was a hardware issue or a software.
Hi, I have one quick Question,

I had an old dell laptop hard drive laying around that had everything from the dell on it still (Recover partition, Windows xp, Etc)

So i decided to wipe it and use it in an old Toshiba so i deleted all the partitions and created a new one and install windows 2000.

The thing is, when ever i turn on the computer right after the Toshiba logo i get that dell recovery check screen where there is that blue branding at the top saying "www.Dell.com" and it does a command then starts windows, i thought i got rid of this when i formatted the hard drive and made sure there was only one full partition which there is. so why does it still say the http://www.dell.com recovery check screen?

Please help me on this

BlueSun

It's probably a hidden partition somewhere. Formatting a drive doesn't wipe it completely.

You could try something like DBAN to zero out the drive and see if that gets rid of it. Obviously, take a backup of anything you want to save first.

BOD

You're not confusing the BIOS screen with this are you?

Anonymous

@BOD: Probably not, as he says he's using a Toshiba laptop (correct me if I'm wrong).

BlueSun's probably right, it could be a left over OEM MBR or something, or some sort of initialization of the recovery partition. If you want to zero the drive, you could use DBAN (Darik's Boot and Nuke), or really any of the utilities on the Ultimate Boot CD. I prefer CopyWipe, it has a fairly simple interface and, as far as I can tell, works.

It's likely a hidden partition of sorts, I'm not sure FDISK would even recognize it if it's not a standard DOS partition, so you're best off zeroing the drive. Though if you have enough space on it currently, and it seems to work, you could probably just leave it.

(plus, some advanced partition editors (GPartEd?) may be able to detect the hidden partition and delete it...)

gdea73

That last post was supposed to be attributed to me, though I can't append this sentence to it, since I apparently wasn't logged it. That happens to me a bit too much lately...