How do I clear system information off an old system drive?

In this excerpt from
Answercast #24, I look at an old hard drive that is being used as a data
drive F and suggest ways to clean it up.

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Cleaning an old hard drive

The approach that I take in situations like that is to basically do something along the lines of what you started to do:

• I would scour the drive for the data files that I wanted to preserve.

• I would copy them off and then I would reformat the drive.

The bottom line is that it’s going to be significantly easier for you to identify the files that you care about – your data files – than it is for you to be able to identify what is and is not a system file. One might think that one could start with just the Windows folder and delete everything in it and by and large, that’s true.

However, It is possible (it’s unusual, but it’s possible) that for some reason you may have something of your own that happened to get left in the Windows folder tree. As a result, I’m hesitant to recommend that as an approach… and it really only takes care of the Windows folder.

Documents and settings

Things get significantly more complex when you start looking at documents and settings. There, by definition, you are going to have files that you care about – your data files – intermixed with files that are presented by or have been created by the system: sometimes large files which potentially include things like the registry.

My strong recommendation is to approach this a little bit differently.

• Extract all the data files that you know of – that you can –from that hard disk.
• Then reformat.

Backup first

If for whatever reason you are concerned that you might not catch something you wanted later, back the drive up first. Make a backup image of that drive and squirrel that away somewhere so that you know that no matter what you delete from it today, you could potentially go back and get something that you missed later.