Reinstall windows xp on OSX, and wipe OSX

[appleistheshiz]

I'm running OSX 10.5 on my MSI wind. Everything has gone good. But I'm wanting to return to XP to sell the net-book.

 

So heres my first problem:

 

My hard drive is originally 160gb. I portioned my hard drive into 2 sections (osx-120gb and data-40gb), while still on XP. Then I installed OSX. I some how deleted the data section on OSX, so now my Hard drive only reads 120gb, and I have no idea how to get around it(disk utility does nothing.)

 

Im hoping when i reinstall XP on this thing, XP will read the full 160gb and I can just delete the OSX portion.

 

2nd question:

 

I do not have a clue on how to get XP back on it. Sense I don't have a CD drive(or portable one.) So how do you suppose I go about doing that? If you could give me some type of link to help me that would be awesome.

 

Thanks

[srs5694]

First, you should completely wipe the partition table for your hard disk. Note that this will render OS X unbootable, so do this only when you're ready to re-install Windows. If your disk uses the MBR partitioning scheme, you can do it from OS X by typing "dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/disk0 bs=512 count=1" in a Terminal window (you may need to add "sudo" to the start of the command line). This won't actually erase the entire hard disk, but its contents will be overwritten when you install Windows.

 

If you used the GUID Partition Table (GPT) scheme to partition your disk, you'll need to do more to wipe the partittion table. Some partitioning tools will do this. For instance, my own GPT fdisk has an option to wipe the GPT data. Properly wiping the GPT data is important for you because if you just write a new MBR with a GPT-unaware utility, the disk will end up with both MBR and GPT partitions defined, which could cause confusion or even data loss in the future. I don't know offhand how the Windows installer reacts to the presence of GPT data structures on the disk, so it's best to do this from OS X or an emergency boot tool that can handle the job.

 

If you've got sensitive data on the computer (passwords, credit card numbers, etc.), you should take additional steps to wipe the disk clean. In Linux or OS X, dd can do this, using a command similar to the above, but omitting the count parameter. If you boot from the hard disk when you do this, it'll probably cause the computer to crash at some point (perhaps even before the operation completes), so it's best to do it from an emergency boot medium, such as a bootable USB flash drive. If this is done properly, it will obviate the need to explicitly wipe the MBR or GPT data. Note that wiping a hard disk this way can take quite a while -- probably several hours. For the slightly paranoid, there are disk utilities that will overwrite the disk data with random data, possibly over several passes, which makes it harder to recover the data using really advanced forensic tools, which can (so I'm told) recover data even after it's been overwritten by 0 values, as the preceding dd command does. For the extremely paranoid, the only option is to physically destroy the hard disk before getting rid of it, but that will also greatly reduce the resale value of your netbook.

 

As to re-installing Windows, my first suggestion is that you contact MSI. They should be able to provide you with a suitable install medium. If they can't, or if they want to charge too much, then MrSquishy3's suggestions of an external USB CD/DVD drive or installation of Windows from a USB flash drive sound good to me, although I've never tried either approach. There might also be network boot/install options, but I don't know enough about either Windows' support for this or the MSI Wind's ability to boot from a network to know if this is practical or possible.