I have an elderly Dell Dimension 5150 desktop. This my "learning" computer, so it is not crucial. :rolleyes: I wish to clean out the hard drive, reinstall the OS; I have the OS CD required. The most highly recommended software was "dban 2.2.7_i586". This is an ISO file. I downloaded this freeware to my HD using Win 7 desktop and burned to CD. [I]It is supposed to be a bootable disk[/I]. So I went into BIOS and changed the boot sequence on XP to put the floppy drive first and the cd rom second; my attempts to download this file using the XP system was to no avail.:confused: It appears that my win XP OS fails to read this disk. The file appears on my Win 7 computer, but not on my Win XP system. I have tried 3 different disks, the third was unwrapped, brand new, for this purpose. This was an RW disk, but this should not make any difference. I have not tried any other free wipe software, since dban was most highly rated. [B][I]My only idea is that this file is a "mirror image" and was copied rather than burned. [/I][/B] I am extremely frustrated by this situation. This 5150 was "raised from the dead" after a particularly virulent episode. Thus my desire to clear everything from this drive. Dban is supposed to clean any HD that it finds; I also installed a 10gb (!!) IDE HD from my first ever computer. I wish to wipe this as well. Is it necessary to reinstall the XP OS in order to wipe these drives? This makes no sense to me, but I am a mid-level computer user, and do not understand this difficulty. :( Any input on this difficulty would be appreciated. :)
