I have this Lenovo IdeaPad that has windows10 on it and I want to wipe the hard drive and install
Linux Fedora 32 on it. Do I need to purchase a new hd and if so will it work without Lenovo on it?
Added (1). I have this Lenovo IdeaPad 330 with windows 10 on it and I need to wipe the hard drive so that I can install the latest version of Linux Fedora
When you install Fedora, from a zip drive or a DVD or whatever, you'll get a message saying 'Hey, Wait a minute! There's already stuff on this hard drive! Do you really want to wipe it out?' (Well, something like that.) You say 'Yes', and it will wipe out Windows 10, erase everything on the disk, and then install Fedora.
It would be easiest to just purchase a new drive yes, probably better than reusing an old one anyway. The easiest way to wipe a used drive clean is to use an adapter to plug it into another machine with a partition app on it, that way you can do a true clean wipe and check it for correct function etc.
Pretty much all Linux distros have a built-in partition manager that they use during the install process. As Mr. Smartypants pointed out, they're often intelligent enough to detect an existing Windows installation and will ask if you want to install Linux alongside Windows, or to remove Windows entirely and just install Linux or to manually partition the drive.
On most Windows 8 and Windows 10 laptops, you might need to disable Secure Boot from the UEFI. This is enabled by default for "security" purposes and won't let you boot Linux, at least not without some other steps. Its better to just disable it for Linux.
You don't really need to wipe it. Anytime you install an OS, it will format the drive and warn you that all information will be lost before hitting next to proceed. Also most installations detect other OS's and either warn you it will be deleted or if there are spare partitions or other drives, will ask if you want it along side the other OS, where it will update/create a boot page for you to select which OS you wish to boot into. I think I had a computer once that I installed 6 OS's on a single drive (separate partitions) and had a menu popup during boot up to ask which of the 6 I wished to boot into. The only time I ever wipe a drive is if I'm throwing it away or giving it away, where there are programs that will write zeroes throughout the entire drive where no information is left.
Just boot to the Linux disc. You can wipe it as you install.
Boot from a disk or thumb drive and do a low level format of the HDD, that will fix it, then install Linux from the same.
You don't need to wipe the whole thing. You should leave the recovery partition intact.
the easiest way is to just delete the c: drive partition then when your fedora install cd starts(or install USB) then it will use the empty space left by the c: drive. Go to Disk Management(right click my_computer and choose MANAGE) at disk management, you see a very simple stripe display of the hard drive showing partitions, simply select the c: drive and DELETE it. Then restart the pc and install fedora. That way your w10 recovery partition should still be there and you should be able to re-install w10 when you have finished with fedora. If you are selling it then you may want to use killdisk to truly erase(blank ) the whole disk