DBAN (Darik's Boot And Nuke)

It was the first time I tried installing Windows on a hard drive that had Linux Mint installed. Windows setup wasn't even recognizing the hard drive. So, after searching online, I found out about DBAN. You can download the tool from www.dban.org and store it in a USB drive.

Once you set up your BIOS to boot from that drive, it brings you to a menu where you have several methods of nuking the hard drive. I read at first that once you begin the nuking process, it wipes all data off of all drives including the USB drive itself. So, I thought that once I was in the menu, I should unplug the USB drive since the program was already residing in memory.

I was wrong. None of the formatting methods worked after I unplugged the USB drive. All of them were giving an error. I tried pressing F4 to troubleshoot the error but there was no joy. So, I decided to restart and just keep the USB plugged in during the entire process. And DBAN did format the USB drive along with my SATA hard drive. And the entire process took 7 hours for a 500 GB hard drive. Talk about low-level format indeed.

But it worked. Windows setup was able to detect the drive afterwards.

My only complaint was the advertisement splash screen at the end of the formatting process. I don't mind having the add as long as it allows me to escape it somehow. Pressing Ctrl-Alt-Delete did nothing. I had to do a hard shutdown just to reboot my PC. Despite this, I would still recommend this tool to anyone having a hard time installing on a hard drive with Linux installed.