Trying to boot with DOS... going in circles

[hat]

I may have found someone interested in my laptop, so I'm trying to wipe the HDD as standard procedure. I have a USB thumb drive formatted with DOS and hdderase, but for some reason, the laptop won't boot from it... (the drive works in other machines)... so the next thing I tried was to make a disc (dvd... don't have any cd's left) with DOS on it. I opened up my DOS image and used magiciso to add hdderase to it, then saved it to my desktop, but it wouldn't burn because it couldn't find the image... I suspect it was beacuse it was a .img file, so I saved it as a .iso and burned it, but it won't boot...

I'm just trying to make a bootable disc with dos and hdd erase on it...

 

[hat]

New problem... I found Killdisk and figured I would try letting thier program format the usb stick for me, and that worked in the laptop... however, when I use the HP USB disk formatting tool to format my usb thumb drive with DOS, it will boot on my main machine, but not on the laptop.

I'm using DOS 7.10, I've uploaded it if anyone's curious to take a look at it...

 

[OneMoar]

why the hell would you use dos http://www.dban.org/

 

[Zehnsucht]

why the hell would you use dos http://www.dban.org/

What a handy tool! Thanks for the tip

 

[hat]

Because HDDerase is a DOS program...

This thread isn't about hard drive erasing tools, it's about a laptop not booting to DOS (but it will boot to killdisk, which uses freedos apparantly) when my other machine (and my uncle's) will...

 

[jagd]

For bootable cd/dvd
http://www.helpwithwindows.com/WindowsXP/Slipstreaming_Windows_XP_Service_Pack_3.html look here to "creating a bootable cd" and look to settings at "boot " and "iso " submenu ,i hope it helps .
If you dont have xp cd ,iirc there was another bootable image surfing on net but i dont remember name/dont have link