Full reinstall questions

[KiloWolf]

Ok, i'm at the point I am wishing to do a full reinstall of my OS. I'm running windows 8.1 and before it comes up. No i'm not going to "upgrade" to windows 10 and I am not going to swap to window 7. Now my question comes from the fact that I am running 3 drives. I am running my OS on a small SSD, I have a secondary E drive that is about 1 tera and then lastly I have 2, 3 tera dard drives in raid 0 format. Now I wanted to do a full clean sweap of my system and clear all data from all drives. I know that on a OS reinstall that second and third drive sets should not be touched by the system.

So my question is this, is there a way to have the system clear all data from all drives, and if so will if mess with the Raid drives?

 

[Math Geek]

during the set-up where you pick the drive to install to, you have the option to format drives. you can simply format all drives before telling it to install to your ssd. this will delete everything from all the drives but won't completely remove the data. it can still be recovered.

if you wish to completely erase and not be able to recover the data then i'd suggest doing the install and then using an eraser program to wipe clean the data drives. really depends on how far you wish to go with the "deletion" of the data.

you could also of course erase the data drives first (either a simple format or total erasure) and then go about the install of windows. either way accomplishes the same thing

 

[KiloWolf]

during the set-up where you pick the drive to install to, you have the option to format drives. you can simply format all drives before telling it to install to your ssd. this will delete everything from all the drives but won't completely remove the data. it can still be recovered.

if you wish to completely erase and not be able to recover the data then i'd suggest doing the install and then using an eraser program to wipe clean the data drives. really depends on how far you wish to go with the "deletion" of the data.

you could also of course erase the data drives first (either a simple format or total erasure) and then go about the install of windows. either way accomplishes the same thing

Thank you very much for the reply. I don't need to super hide anything or anything like that. I just wanted a clean slate on my computer. And what about the raid drives? Can they even be formated like that by the system of will I need to clear those myself before hand?

 

[Math Geek]

i can't say anything about the raid drives. never actually tried formatting them and not sure how windows handles that. i would suspect that it will simply format it as is and leave the raid in place but this is only an educated guess.

 

[KiloWolf]

i can't say anything about the raid drives. never actually tried formatting them and not sure how windows handles that. i would suspect that it will simply format it as is and leave the raid in place but this is only an educated guess.

Well, thank you very much. I'll just be safe and clear the data myself just in case.