Format hard drive without starting windows

My hard drive must be corrupted/missing files etc. I cant boot any windows install/linux. Because i currently can't launch any OS (I also tried running dban to complete wipe my hard drive but there was a cat error can't open cmd line.),how can i format my hdd if i can't boot to anything? Is there another program that i can download like dban? Or is there another way to format my hard drive?

2

2 Answers

You have two solutions:

• Take your HDD out of your computer, connect it to another computer and format it from there
• Use a live DVD/USB to boot into a temporary OS and wipe your HDD

Note that after wiping your disk you will have to completely reinstall an OS, so I higly suggest solution #2 since almost every live medium comes with its own installer.

If your PC firmware permits, you can go to an EFI shell prompt and then run diskpart then enter these commands to create an EFI/GPT partition table, activate the drive, and create a GPT partition table so it can be formatted by the installer:

diskpart
list disk
sel disk 0
clean
list disk
convert gpt
list disk
exit