Scrubbing Used Drives Clean - HP Restore Partitions dont allow removal

[DaveLembke]

Got a pile of hard drives given to me from a friend who did a bunch of HDD to SSD conversions for people and had no use for 80GB to 320GB in capacity HDD's and a couple of the drives have a HP Recovery Partition that I cant delete with Windows. Windows 7 64-bit is what I am using with a SATA external to USB docking unit. Most of the drives are healthy according to crystaldiskinfo and I was able to wipe out peoples data and windows etc off of them, dump the partitions and create one new partition and format them, however there are 2 drives that came out of HP laptops that have a HP Restore Partition and in Disk Management of Windows 7 64-bit where you can normally delete partitions it only gives an option for Help when right-clicking on the partition.

Was wondering how these partitions are protected from being deleted, and if I need to use a tool to wipe the partitions or if I should just use a Linux system to try to delete these protected system recovery partitions with that?

[patio]

Linux should do it...Easus Partition Manager will as well.

[DaveLembke]

Cool Thanks 

Any idea what tool or software HP is using to protect a partition from being wiped?

[BC_Programmer]

Partitions can be marked protected via EFI. Windows sometimes creates some of these partitions during installation, and of course recovery/restore partitions almost always get marked as protected as well. Disk Management won't allow those volumes to be interacted with. GNU Partition Tool probably wouldn't care.

Within windows you can also use the command line equivalent to Disk Management, Diskpart, and use the "CLEAN" command (with the correct drive selected! For the love lf all things!) to completely wipe all partitions from a drive, including any protected partitions.

[DaveLembke]

(with the correct drive selected! For the love lf all things!)

    Yeah I will be VERY CAREFUL ... but good to share in case someone else runs with this info shared to double or triple check before running it. Nuking data isnt a good thing if unintentional.  Thanks for the additional info BC