Reformatting hard drive????

poppett

Hope this is in the right place. While on the phone to AOHell this morning I was advised to help my pc run faster and to stop it freezing and shutting down on me,I had to destructive restore and reformat the hard drive. Now hubby did a destrusctive restore a few weeks back but what does reformatting the hard disk entail? Hubby's at work at the moment so I don't know if he had done this (although I don't think so ) and can't ask him but would like to be able to give him some idea of how to do it when he gets home, if he hasn't already.

Any pc wise guys or gals out there who can give me some advice? Very much appreciated....ta :rotfl:

MercilessKiller

Reformat = Wipe the disc COMPLETELY clean.. then re-install windows and recover files from a backup.

Its a fantastic way to speed up your computer

A lot of people say "don't reformat everytime you have a slow computer".. but I disagree. It only takes a couple of hours.. it gets rid of a lot of junk that spyware stuff won't sort out (redundant files etc)... and basically, in order to do the same thing without formatting, it would take a LOT longer...

You can always run ya standard spyware cleaner programs and that will speed things up in the short time.. but its always nice to start of fresh

All you need is your Windows Disc, and your important files saved to backup somewhere.. either online or physical

spakkker

Hi when you re-load windows onto your pc it will offer you the choice of a quick format or a thorough-not quick- format. This means that you will lose any data, pics. music etc. that is on your hard drive so if there's anything you want to save you must backup first-burn to cd/dvd/usb pen drive. You lose the data whatever format you choose. But if you have re-loaded windows fairly recently I doubt that it will be worth while doing again. Try and get rid of mcaffee and/or norton as these both slow a pc down. Also if there are progs runnig that you aren't using set them not to start with windows and if you no longer use a prog just uninstall it.

ormus

formatting wipes the hdd completely and gets it ready install the OS.
if you partition and reformat a hdd, then you loose everything. so make sure you back up all/any personal data req first.

if say you are reinstalling xp, when prompted it will partition and then format the hdd partition/s.
the best way of doing this is to make at least 2 partitions. (format both) the OS can go on the 1st and all your data can go on the 2nd.
that way, any future problems with the OS, will/should not effect your data.

as been said many times, the key to all this is to make back ups regulary. esp if your data is important to you.

poppett

Thanks everyone, so it sounds like this was done then. i remember hubby backing up everything we wanted to keep and then opting for the destructive restore rather than restoring to a safe date. It then took us a good 12 hours to load everything back onto a "like new" computer. I was just a bit confused about the reformating hard drive, thought perhaps you need to do more. but that's me...dinosaur where this things concerned!

sleep2much

Formatting does not wipe the drive clean, it just marks it as available space, data is not erased until written over, you can download programmes that will recover data from a formatted disk, or ones that WILL remove all data, but that is for security, it won't make your computer go any faster.....just thought I'd add my 2 penneth.