There is a utility built-into Windows (even XP Pro and Vista) that will overwrite all the free space on a hard drive, insuring any files you’ve deleted stay dead. Launch a command prompt and type cipher /w:X where X is the letter of the drive or partition you want to wipe. Be patient the process can take a long time if you have a lot of free space.

First of all this is probably what you are currently looking at:

If you hit “DELETE” on the OEM Partition you can’t delete it like other partitions. If you right click on the OEM partition you will notice you don’t have the same options.

Normally you’d see:

To delete the OEM partition you are going to need to hit “Windows Key” + “R”. This will open the run dialogue box. Type “diskpart” and hit “OK”.

This will open a black command prompt like window. Type “list disk”. This will display all the disks.

You can verify which disk you want to edit using the “Disk Management Tools”. The Disk management tools can be found by Right Clicking Computer and selecting “Management”.As you can tell from the first screen shot in this post the OEM partition is located on Disk 2.

You must now select the disk with the OEM partition on it. Again in my case it is “Disk 2”. To select the disk you must type “select disk 2”.

You can now type “list partition” to list all the partitions on the disk just in case you want to verify you absolutely have the right disk selected.

You must now select the partition. In my case it is “Partition 1”. To do this you must type the command “select partition 1”.

Now type “delete partition override”.

Once you do that you have officially removed the OEM partition on the drive! Congratulations!

This article will cover troubleshooting sending email using telnet. If you are using Windows XP or Windows 7 you just need to install the the built in telnet program. If you are running Windows Vista in order to use telnet you should download “puttytel”.

These are the steps you would use to test sending emails using telnet. This assumes that telnet is running on your machine or you have installed puttytel. Puttytel will be a bit different but shouldn’t be that different that you won’t be able to follow along.

1.) Open Command Prompt – Start – Run – cmd.exe

2.) type “telnet domain-name.com 25” – Eg. Here’s a real life example. telnet smtp.themeetingplace.mb.ca 25 (BTW

What this is going to try and do is:

a.) Run Telnet connection

b.) To smtp.themeetingplace.mb.ca

c.) on Port 25.

Here’s an example of what will be displayed.

Here’s an example how to test sending email using Telnet. I have replaced the “@” with “_” to prevent spiders from harvesting the email addresses.

HELO smtp.themeetingplace.mb.ca
MAIL FROM: <tech_themeetingplace.mb.ca>
RCPT TO: <jheinrichs_winningdesigns.ca>
DATA:
Subject: Test email using Telnet
From: tech_themeetingplace.mb.ca
To: jheinrichs_winningdesigns.ca
<hit Enter>
Hello,
This is a test using telnet
Goodbye!
<hit Enter>
QUIT
.

The period “.” in the telnet session closes the connection. It has to be on the last line. Please note the using the back-key it inserts special hidden character that can mess up sending the message.

How to Run “nslookup”.

You are going to need to open a command prompt. To do this in Windows go to “START” – “RUN” – and then type “cmd”. This will open the command prompt.

Once the command prompt is up and running you are going to want to type in: “nslookup”

You will notice that you are given two pieces of information.

1. Default Server: This is the default DNS server that your machine is using.
2. Address: This is the IP address of the DNS server that your machine is using.

Underneath this info from the nslookup command you will see this:

This is where you are going to be able to type in “Filters”. These filters are going to be like “MX”, A Records , or PTR records. For example to turn on the filter in nslookup to only show MX records you would type:

You have now set the filter “Type” to MX. This will now only display MX records. Here’s the output from me looking up Google’s MX records.

Another command you might want to try is setting the filter to type=PTR. That is Reverse Lookup.