formatting?

if you format your hard drive, you erase everything (including the operating system) make sure you have backups of all your personal files, and locate your system restore cds. then you can format. it is under disk management

kevin dust
June 2007

If its a new hard disk or you want to reinstall an operating system then it is very good practice to fdisk and then format the hard disk in question. To fdisk, you usually need to have a boot disk and run that from there. When the fdisk is done,i.e. the dos partition has been set, then you can proceed to formatting the hard disk.
After this has been done, install operating system and then a partition program to create partitions if you have a large hard disk as windows partition creator is useless. I recommend Powerquest Partition Magic 8 for this. Once this is done, you are free to install other programs to these partitions. Just as a word of advice though....try to install other programs to partitions other than c and this will ensure the operating system works reasonably quickly.

Good Luck.
CJ

CJ
March 2007

What do you mean by 'format your computer'. You don't format computers you format disks. Format is what you do to a new disk or a disk that you wish to clear completely. For instance if you were to format your main (C:) disk you would erase everything on it, including the Operating Systems (Windows? - you don't say).

Try a new question with what you are trying to achieve.

t
March 2007