Recently had occasion to right off an old laptop rather than get it repaired. In order to retrive files from it i bought a caddy and loaded up the old HDD.
I’ve now moved all the necessary files over to my new laptop (thanks to those that helped me with the problems i had there) and i want to use this old drive to back-up files on a regular (well, good intentions…) basis.
Problem is, this drive is practically full and i can’t just delete all the content using explorer presumably because windows sees the ‘Documents and Settings’ and ‘Program Files’ folder and/or content as system files.
When i hit delete i don’t even get an error message, it just thinks about it for a while and then does nothing. I’ve tried changing the ‘read only’ attribute but this doesn’t seem to work either.
How can i get this drive back to empty again? It obviously used to be a windows boot drive, do i need to do anything special to get it into a (sort of) virginal condition again?
I was thinking easiest thing to do would be to reformat it? Don’t actually know how to do that either though.