How to Clean & Erase Hard Drive on HP

By Jay Darrington

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Hewlett Packard computers typically start out well, but become bloated as they age. Or, you might be annoyed at the fact that when you buy an HP computer, it comes with trial software you might never use. In both cases, one possible solution is to clean and erase the hard drive that came with your HP computer, eliminating everything on it to be rebuilt anew.

Step 1

Back up any documents or files that you want to keep to another hard drive or CD.

Step 2

Reinstall the operating system on your HP, and specify that you want to do a clean install. This will completely erase your hard drive and then reinstall the operating system. Alternatively, you also may get this result from installing another operating system such as a Linux distribution, or upgrading to a different Windows system.

Step 3

Perform a system restore. You can typically do this using the recovery partition on most HP computers. If there is no partition, use the restore and recovery disk that came with your computer. This will reinstall your operating system on a clean slate, but it will also include any software that originally came with the computer.

Step 4

Use a disk wiping program to utterly eliminate any data on the disk.

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