Image forming apparatus with hard disk drive securely formatted

1. An image forming apparatus for forming an image on a supplied sheet, comprising:

a processor;

a hard disk drive coupled to the processor;

program storing means, coupled to the processor, for storing a program;

control means, coupled to the processor, equipped with instruction inputting means and display means,

a detection means that detects whether the use of the image forming apparatus is a first time or not,

a rewritable nonvolatile memory, coupled to the processor, for storing use-information that indicates either “unused” or “used” and is coupled to the processor,

a coupling means to which a memory key comprised of a removable memory device is coupled; and

an interface for a removable memory device coupled in between the coupling means and the processor,

wherein the program includes a routine to format the hard disk drive, and wherein the routine orders the processor to perform the steps of:

(a) if it is detected that the use of the image forming apparatus is a first time, 1) displaying, on the display means, a screen to select whether to perform a physical format with overwriting dummy data onto each sector in the hard disk drive, and 2) performing the physical format if it is detected that the use of the image forming apparatus is not a first time, or if an instruction from the instruction inputting means indicates that the overwrite process should be performed;

(b) performing a logical format on the hard disk drive;

(c) reading authorization information from the memory key if the memory key is coupled to the coupling means and the use-information indicates “unused”;

(d) determining whether the authorization information is valid or not; and

(e) if the validity of the authorization information is verified, writing use-information that indicates “used” on the nonvolatile memory and proceeding to the step (a),

wherein step (a) includes a determination of how many times power of the image forming apparatus has been turned on, and the detection determination in step (a) determines that the number of times that the power of the image forming apparatus has been turned on is one,

wherein the memory key stores use-information that indicates either “unused” or “used”,

wherein the program orders the processor to perform the step of, after the step (e), writing use-information that indicates “used” on the memory key,

wherein step (c) comprises reading the use-information from the memory key, and proceeding to the step (d) only when the use-information indicates “unused”,

wherein step (a) further comprises displaying a screen for selecting a first mode and a second mode whose overwriting times are different to each other,

wherein the number of times of writing dummy data onto each sector corresponds to one of the first and second modes selected by the instruction inputting means, and

wherein a user inputs a key into the display of the image forming apparatus to aid in the creation of a secret key in order to encrypt to a hard disk before writing data and decrypt to the hard disk after reading data.