How Do You Format Hard Drive ?

how do you format your hard drive? sPyfReEsTyLe

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Hi Spyfrestyle, you can format your harddrive in many ways it all depends on its purpose after the format and also wat operating system you are running. So i will tell you the most common way and then maybe you can repy and tell us if thats wat you have and if it worked. So if you are formating a drive currently in use the keyword is BACKUP - make sure you have either burned to dvd or cd or transfered all neccessary data and accounts and so forth to a safe place. Then if you are formating for the use of a system drive all you need to do is stick in the operating system disk and follow the on screen prompts wen it asks you to leave the current file system intact (Windows XP/2K) click on NO and format with NTFS (since this is the most common way) otherwise if its just a harddrive mounted in your system that you use for data there is a simple method (again XP/2K) right click on your my computer and then left click on manage find, click on disk management and then right click on the hard drive you wish to format and then click format and a wizard will appear i suggest you use the default settings provided and again use NTFS. And you are done.

Good Luck

 

 

 

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I took a computer maintanence course last summer. It was prety basic with a bunch of fixing up computers. We worked with Windows 98s and learned how to fix up the computer's hard drive, motherboard and stuff. There was a part of the course that we have to format the hard drive using MS-DOS. I think it was pretty simple. You run MS-DOS from setup and from your a: (Which is where your system disk is located - we used floppy disks) i just typed "format c:" then everything gets formatted.

But after that we learnt something more complicated like editing and deleting partitions or something. I wanted to try with my home computer but my mom didn't trust me and refused to let me change any partitions. Now i just stick with the system CD. I just pop it in like bread and toaster and click on the "next"s. Takes about 50minutes but during that time i'll just sleep. Like is good....

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So, Reaver gave you the most important points : first backup everything you can, on floppy disks if you are a beginner with few personal data, on CD-Roms if you start having a lot of data.
The keypoint is effectively to trust the Microsoft Windows system install disk, for installing the system disks, which is usually called the c:\partition.
I would like to emphasis the second point. Do not create only a single partition, in other words don't stay with only the C:\ disk.
When installing the system, you should not use the whole disk for the system. Then, when the system works, your first job will be to use the windows disk manager (or the "fdisk" tool used by techocian) and create extra partitions, about 10 to 20 gigs wide. format them NTFS ou FAT32, as yo prefer. These partitions will be for your data : movies, pictures etc...
Why using extra partitions for your data ? Because when your system will be down (because of a virus or because of a big mistake) you will be able to re-install the system on the c: disk, without losing your data on the d: or the e: disk!
Moreover, you can create a full backup of your c: disk on some part of the d: disk, and then boot from a floppy and restore your c: disks from you backup on a part of d: disk, using backup tools like Norton Ghost.
But that's another story. An important story too, as important as the first format story, but a separate story.
Hope this helped.
Yordan

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I use Partition Magic. If you look around, you can get it for about $20. It is great software, and it makes formatting easy, and also partitioning very easy. It is great if you are doing something like installing linux. (In this case, I had windows, shrunk the windows partition using partition magic, and then I put linux in the free space, installed linux, and had a dual boot system.)

I have also heard that if you repartition your hard drive too many times it is bad for the HDD, but I'm not sure if that is true, does anyone know if this is true or just a rumor.?

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+1 for partition Magic

I do such a re-partiton at least once a month on my systems, because I do often different kinds of testing. I killed two motherboards during last eight years, and I had no disk problem yet on the systems where I used Parition magic.

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another good way, but very novice as it doesnt really save information os to use a Windows Boot up disc to reboot the comp MS-DOS mode, from there you can use the format c:(or the HDD your formatting). I know this method seems very out of date, but it was the first way I learned to format on my own when i had just started messing with computers.

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"format c:" is also the way I do it today, it remains the fastest and the safest way. If your C: partition is fat32 formatted, you simply boot on a ms-dos floppy. If your C: disk is a NTFS partition, you are still able to boot on a dos disquette, but ms-dos will not be able to format your drive.

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I always format and partition my disk by simple dos command. I found it very easy and fast. I don't think there is any need of third party software for doing this simple task.

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From what I've heard, Partition Magic (Tragic? ) works fine with FAT32 but beware of it when using with NTFS. It can screw up things pretty bad sometimes. I always use NTFS only because FAT32 doesn't work very well with partitions greater than 32GB.

I tried Partition Magic 9.0 once and it screwed up my drive so badly that I had to delete all the partitions and re-partition, re-format and re-install. The problem I had was, when I ran Partition magic for the first time, it gave me a pop-up message saying "there is some error in your sector blahblahblah... would you like partition magic to fix it?". Naturally, I selected 'Yes' and that's when the problem started. I didn't resize any partition or anything, planning to do it later and then after a restart, BOOM! It's gone! Windows wouldn't boot up. I tried to reinstall windows, but when I came to the screen showing the partitions, there was an 8MB partition right above my C drive. I tried to ignore it and install into C, but it kept saying "windows XP could not be installed on this drive". Same result with all the other partitions.

Finally, I had to delete all the partitions (including the 8MB one) and make new partitions again, and it worked.

To cut a long story short, I wouldn't advise you to use Partition magic at all if you've got important files on your computer.

For basic drive management, if you are using Windows XP, you can just right click on 'My computer', select 'Manage', and then in the window that opens, in the right part, select -> 'Storage' -> 'Disk Management'. That should help you change drive letters, format your partitions or make new partitions out of unpartitioned space.

But if you have a Linux partition, you should have Service Pack 2 installed if you want to see those partitions. They are displayed as 'Unknown Partitions'. Otherwise, it shows it as 'Unpartitioned Space'... so be careful .

Cheers .

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