What is Reformatting?

[Uber_Gamer]

Reformatting your hard drive just means deleting everything on it, wiping it clean right? And how do you reformat a hard drive?

[rjfvillarosa]

First question is why do you want to reformat? or simply put
"format the hard drive".
You are right in your assumption that the drive will be wiped clean, in your specifications you say that windows has been "significantly tweaked", well all that tweaking will be lost.
Can you be a little more specific as to why you want to format your hard drive, and also do you have another hard drive available that you could possibly use to ghost your original hard drive so as not to loose all of that tweaking.

[kram 2.0]

Originally Posted by Uber_Gamer Reformatting your hard drive just means deleting everything on it, wiping it clean right? And how do you reformat a hard drive?

Put it in the most simplest terms, it's wiping out your HDD. You only want to do it practically under two circumstances. First, if your computers' backbone and OS is screwed up, or second, if you are going to start over with everything new again - like selling a computer.

kram

[Uber_Gamer]

Well right now, reformatting is only theoretical. But in the future when I upgrade and add new components I'd feel better if there was no driver or random residue sitting around from old installs and uninstalls.

But once again (you didn't tell me) how do I reformat it?

[rjfvillarosa]

there are many ways to FORMAT a hard drive depending on the file system type, if it is a windows 98/ME installation with a FAT32 file system you can run FORMAT from the A prompt in DOS. If you have windows XP installed you can do a reinstall of XP using the XP disc and it will prompt you, as to if you want to do a format. You can run "FDISK" in DOS or you can run "partition magic".
There are many ways it depends on the person and the reason and in some ways the OS.

[kingoftowns]

you do understand that if you format your hdd it deletes EVERYTHNG!! so make sure you have a full copy of windows (not an upgrade or copy that came with another computer) as windows will no longer be there after the reformat and trying to use a copy of windows that came with another computer, i.e. dell or hp, likely will require some files that are stored on the hdd to work, just wanted to make sure you know before you did it .

[sigmaseven]

Know that from experiance kings? jk, i actually used a dell xp disk once, worked fine for a month before I got pro.

[kingoftowns]

yeah sometimes they work but it would suck to find out the hard way that it doesn't, and thank god no, that has never happened to me, starving poor student here and i cant imagine having to wait until i could come up the money to purchase the full version of the os to be able to use my computer again

[pzs22]

Your signiture says you have windows XP. To format your machine boot off the windows XP CD and you can format the machine right through the windows setup. Just delete your partition and then create a new one, it will ask you how you would like to format this new partition. Choose NTFS (I like to choose normal NTFS not the quick format) and let it run. ALL DATA will be lost on your drive. You will be left with a fresh copy of windows and nothing else.

[TheMajor]

1) What is Reformatting?

When formatting the harddrive won't erase data right away. If you are deleting a bunch of files from anywhere on your disk, the system tells the drive which files in which locations you are "removing". The drive will then goto it's table and remove the file's entry (or folder's entry) and remove it from the table. This way, the drive no longer "thinks" that the removed file is still on the drive. The files actually don't even move.....they are all still on the physical drive. The file(s) get removed (or over written) when you add an application or more files to replace the area on the drive where the other files physically were.

A good way to think of it is like a book. All of your data is stored in "chapters" and their location is recorded in a "table of contents". When you delete something, the operating system erases the "chapter" or files location from the "table of contents". The chapter is still in the book, but it doesnt show it in the table of contents, or to the user.

So what that means to you is even if you empty your recycle bin or format ur harddrive, you can use data recovery software to get that data back. to permanently erase data you use disk wiping software that wipes the entire hard disk, the free space, or just certain files. disk wiping takes a long time to do.

Instead of the actual disk-space being marked as ready for use, it will take something like 0010 1101 etc and write it to 0000 0000... all the way through, mutiple times. The applications needs to do this about 7-12 times at least to make sure nobody can recover ur files. be warned, though. you dont want to do this on an old drive (I'd say 10 years or so) since much of the HDD info is contained on it's own manufacturers partition and if you write zero's it wont know what it is. be a pain in the a$$ to fix. anyhow, for example there is first aid I think by western digital.

2) How do you format?

A few options:
-make a win98 bootfloppy (www.bootdisk.com) (only werks with FAT(16) and FAT32)
-Hook up ur drive in another comp and format from there, either with windows (disk management) or with a program like Partition Magic.
-boot with a winXP disc and select format during installation.