A technician would like to ensure all previous data is erased before reloading Windows 7 Home Premium onto a laptop. Which of the following procedures would accomplish this?

Virtual RAID configuration is a storage redundancy or performance technique and does not format or erase data on a drive.

A quick format only removes the file system metadata (e.g., the MFT or FAT), leaving the actual data on the disk recoverable with forensic tools.

Creating a new partition repartitions the disk but does not necessarily overwrite the data residing in those sectors.

A full format writes zeros to every sector of the disk in addition to rebuilding the file system structures, making previous data unrecoverable under normal circumstances. This satisfies the requirement to erase all previous data before reloading the OS. Quick format, by contrast, only clears the file allocation table without touching the underlying data.