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I am trying to wipe an old laptop's hard drive. It doesn't have a CD drive, so I have been using a USB flash drive to try and wipe the hard drive from the BIOS.
I have been using DBAN which I installed as an ISO on the USB flash drive. Whenever I try to boot into this I get an error saying: No operating system.
Does anyone know of a way to wipe a hard drive?
I also tried to boot into safe mode, but it gets stuck in a endless loop.
joshuahornby10
Posted 2013-11-11T18:49:44.307
Reputation: 123
1You are confused as to what the 'BIOS' is. You aren't trying to wipe your system from BIOS, you are simply trying to boot into a different operating system from the one installed on your system. – ChrisInEdmonton – 2013-11-11T18:51:32.240
Ah right ok. How do I go about wiping the hard drive then? Sorry for the confusion. – joshuahornby10 – 2013-11-11T18:59:26.910
Sounds like you haven't configured your computer to boot from USB. Exactly how you do so will depend on your specific computer. Sometimes, it's F12 or ESC as you are booting. – ChrisInEdmonton – 2013-11-11T19:15:25.427
When you created the USB drive, did you actually create it as a bootable one? There's more to it than copying some files from an ISO to it. – Moses – 2013-11-11T20:42:15.233
BIOSs used to be able to do low level formatting of hard drives. I havent seen this feature in a very long time – Keltari – 2013-11-12T04:03:38.613