Formatting a Hard Drive

How To Format a Hard Drive

There are many times that I find it necessary to format a hard drive on a computer system that I am working on. Many of the home systems that come to our labs are in such bad shape that the best thing to do is format the hard drive and them reload the operating system and drivers and software.

When I talk with the client in person or by phone I always ask,

1. What is the computer doing? They usually say that it is running extremely slow, have several pop-ups appearing, wont let me download anything, take me to places on the internet that I don’t want to go.
2. Then I will ask how long has this been going on? There come back will be for some time now.
3. Next question, when was the last time you had the computer tuned and cleaned up, and or you cleaned the registry files and defragged the computer. 9 times of 10 they will say never.

Internal Hard Drive

It is amazing that most people think they can run a computer especially on the internet and they don’t have to do anything to it to keep running at optimum performance.

From the scenario above almost all the computers that we have come into our lab are in terrible shape. We will first check over the system and almost inevitably we will ghost copy an image of the drive and then format the drive to erase all the data that is stored on it.

Step by step directions to format a hard drive

External Hard Drive

Backup - Before doing anything to format the hard drive, back up the data from the hard drive that you are going to format. There are several ways to do this, the easiest way is to purchase an external hard drive for about $30 - $50. Most external hard drives have back up software built into them to make the process much easier to do. You want to make sure that you back up your Documents folder, your bookmarks, your email and contacts, and if possible your drivers folder. If you have documents and pictures saved elsewhere on your computer make sure you copy them over to the external hard drive. Remember, when we format everything will be erased from the drive and it will not be recoverable.

For formatting a hard drive you have some options in this area. We will now look at these options.

Format by menu – IF you are running a dual drive you can format the slave drive by going to “My computer” and selecting the slave drive usually drive “D”. Right click on the drive and select “Format” from the window that popped up. Another little window will appear and ask you to select the file system you want to use. If your operating system is XP or newer use the NTFS file system. Now select Quick Format option and then click start. After this is completed your drive will be totally erased and it is read to use again.

Using Windows Installation Disk – Again make sure all data is backed up. Restart your computer and choose the option to enter into your BIOS setup. This is sometimes done by either pressing your Delete or ESC or F1 key. It should tell you when you restart. Go into the setup menu and go into boot configurations. Choose to boot from CD/DVD. Install your windows install disk into the drive and then exit setup. When exiting it will prompt you to save and exit, choose this option. As your computer restarts it will prompt you to hit any key to boot from disk, do this. You cannot format while your operating system is running and by booting from disk it keeps the operating system from firing up. After the compute boots to windows installation it will take you through several screens before it gets to the format area. When you get to the area to format it will ask you to either format by NTFS or FAT32. By choosing NTFS it will allow the drive to run faster and more secure than FAT32. After this your hard drive is formatted and all data is gone from the hard drive. You can proceed now to reloading the operating system that you want.

Older Computers - You can choose to reformat sections of your hard drive by using the command window. Type ‘format’ at the command line, followed by the drive name. For example, if you want to format the D drive, type .If you want to do a quick format on a particular drive, you should pass the Q parameter as well, for example, 

Newer Computers - Open the control panel. You can find the control panel in the Windows Vista start menu located in the lower left corner of the screen. Select “System and Maintenance.” Click “Administrative Tools.” Select “Computer Management.” You may be prompted for a password if you are not an administrator in Windows Vista. Select “Storage” from the Disk Management section of the navigation pane. Highlight the hard drive you want to format. Right-click the drive and select “Format” from the menu. Click “OK.”

These are some options for you to try and format your own hard drive. Again I caution you that formatting a hard drive erases everything on it. So make sure that you have backed up everything onto an external hard drive, or flash drive, or CD/DVD.