Anything contained on your hard drive that you wish to keep should be backed up before using WreckDisk.

For those of you who are not aware...

A Hard Drive Storage Device is "seen" by your computer as a numbered device. Hard Drive 0 though Hard Drive 3 for most personal computers. Also referenced as hdd0 - hdd3.

If you have only one physical hard drive it is Drive 0 and will be the drive that WreckDisk does it's thing on.

A hard drive cannot be used by your computer until it has at least one PARTITION created on it. A partition is basically a definition of a section of the available space of a physical storage device (hard drive). A single hard drive can have many partitions. And each partition will typically be assigned a drive letter with the first partition being assigned the drive letter C.

So if you remove ALL partitions like WreckDisk is designed to do, you are removing Drive C and all that it contains. If you have Windows installed on Drive C then when you remove all partitions you will also be removing Windows.

You CANNOT remove a partition without also removing everything that is contained within that partition.

Here is an analogy that may help some people.

Think of your hard drive as a walk in closet where you can place filing cabinets.

Think of a Partition as a filing cabinet. You can have different kinds of filing cabinets. Some have drawers for hanging folders some have drawers that are wide but only as deep as a file folder and others have drawers that are deep but only as wide as a file folder. Some are wider for filing legal sized paper while others will only hold letter sized folders. These represent the different ways a partition must be formatted to hold the different ways that different operating systems access files.

When you place a filing cabinet into your walk in closet you can get a filing cabinet that fills all the space in your closet or you can get 2 or 3 filing cabinets that fit into your walk in closet. Each filing cabinet has to be labeled with a letter starting with the letter C.

Think of a Filing cabinet that holds letter sized files as a Windows formatted filing cabinet. Think of a filing cabinet that holds legal sized files as a Linux filing cabinet.

Once you have at least one filing cabinet labeled C that is where you will install your Windows Operating system. But first you must "format" it. Lets say that formatting is like assembling the drawers and hangers for folders and putting labels on the drawers. Now, when you install Windows, there are rules that state your Windows Operating system has to be in the top most drawer of the Cabinet labeled C. Because your computer is told to always look in the top drawer of cabinet C for the files necessary to boot the computer.

And so on..

So now, you want to use WreckDisk to remove all partitions. That's like a big fork truck coming into your walk in closet and grabbing each and every filing cabinet and taking them to a dumpster. The fork truck doesn't care what kind of filing cabinet it is. It doesn't look inside the drawers and it doesn't magically protect anything inside the filing cabinet. It can't without enough available free space in your walk in closet and some other filing cabinet to place the contents of the cabinet it's getting rid of. And even if this extra space was available, WreckDisk is not designed to do this function. It's sole purpose is to get those filing cabinets into the dumpster as fast as possible.

So when WreckDisk is done removing all the filing cabinets from your closet you are left with a big open space ready for new filing cabinets of your choosing. Everything that was contained in the old filing cabinets went to the dumpster along with the filing cabinets.

So anything currently contained in your partition(s) (filing cabinets) that you wish to keep must be copied to some other closet (storage device) before running WreckDisk. Since an operating system is created (drawer labels and file hangers, etc.) it cannot be copied intact, it can only be re-created in some other closet (hard drive) that already has a new cabinet (partition).

It's just not physically possible to SAVE an installed operating system (windows for example) when you are deleting a partition. There are some exceptions however. You can create a Drive Image which is a bit for bit copy of the contents of your hard drive. However, there is no point to doing this simply to bring everything back to the original hard drive. You can't separate out what you want to keep and what you don't wish to keep with an image. It's only purpose beside being a complete backup of a drives contents is to move your existing filing cabinets from one closet to another.

I hope this helps you to understand what a partition is AND that you can't keep anything on your hard drive when you remove it's partitions unless you back it up to some other storage device. And regardless, you will have to install an operating system after removing partitions.

an external USB hard disc need at least one primary partition. partition and then create as many logical drives as you needed..


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Hi this is Fransis.
Yes I think so that you should backup the all data before using the wreck disk. The data backup should be done by TODO method. However the data recovery is not reliable.
Thanks.