What's the best way to clear my hard drive of everything but the operating system?

In this excerpt from
Answercast #34, I look at the difficulties involved in trying to erase
everything on a hard drive except the operating system. Our old standby,
reformat and reinstall, will do the trick.

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The operating system

Unfortunately, there is no way to clear your machine of everything except the operating system.

The problem is that programs that have been installed over time kind-of blur the line of where the operating system begins and ends. Windows is pretty poorly designed in that sense. There are many things that make it difficult to understand exactly what is and is not part of the operating system.

• A good example is Internet Explorer.

We don’t think of Internet Explorer as being part of the operating system. We think of it as being a standalone application in its own right. Yet, many components of Internet Explorer are actually used by Windows itself.

Reformat and reinstall

So, since there is no way to do exactly what you’re asking for, the only solution I can offer is to do the traditional:

• Reformat your machine completely (in other words, erase everything including the operating system);

• And then reinstall the operating system from scratch.

That’s really the only way to insure that the only thing on your machine is the operating system.

Securely erase the drive

If you’re concerned about files possibly being recovered, you might consider using DBAN: Darik’s Boot and Nuke. That is used to securely erase the entire hard disk, eliminating all traces of any files that might have been there.

• Do that before you install Windows again from scratch.

Your only option

Unfortunately, as I said, there really isn’t a way to do exactly what you’re asking for. The only way is to erase everything and reinstall the OS from scratch.