Formatting a hard drive often becomes necessary when it is infected by Trojans or viruses that are difficult to remove or when there are bad sectors on your drive.
A hard drive should be divided into small partitions to utilize the space effectively. You will need to format your hard drive when you feel the need to reorganize the space available.
Remember, formatting the hard drive or any of its partitions will completely erase all data that is present. This article gives you the steps that you will need to follow to correctly go about the formatting exercise.
Reformatting your Hard Drive Using the Windows Installation Disk
First and foremost, backup all the data from the hard drive partitions that you want to format. For example, you may want to backup your ‘Documents and Settings’ folder so that you can use it on a new installation of Windows. Also remember to backup other important items like the internet browser bookmarks.
Restart your PC and enter the BIOS setup by pressing the ‘Delete’ key. Once in the setup, ensure that the boot configuration is set to allow the CD/DVD drive to boot first.
Insert the Windows installation disk in the drive and then exit the setup after saving the changes.
As your machine restarts, you should be prompted to press any key to boot from the disk. It is important to boot from the disk because you cannot format your system partition from the operating system itself.
The Windows installation screen should take you through several steps before you are allowed to format an existing drive.
You can choose to reformat existing partitions, delete existing partitions, or create new partitions in unpartitioned space. Choose the required amount of space by specifying a number denoting the formatted area in megabytes.
You may choose NTFS or FAT32 for formatting; NTFS drives are faster, superior and more secure.
Reformatting Your Hard Drive Using Computer Management
The steps given below will help you format a non-system drive on your hard disk. These steps are not applicable for formatting the system drive, which is the C: drive on most computers.
Search for the My Computer icon in your computer; right-click it, and select Manage from the options that appear.
A new window named Computer Management will pop up on the screen. Select Storage from the options available on the left side, and then choose “Disk Management (local)” from the options that appear in the window.
Now you’ll see a list of the all the available partitions on your hard disk.
Delete the partition you want to delete from the hard drive. If you wish to remove all the partitions, delete all the partitions one by one. Right-click the partition’s box, and select Delete Partition from the options. Click “Yes” to confirm the deletion.
Now you’ll see a box that reads Unallocated. You need to right-click the box, and then select New Partition from the options.
After the New Partition Wizard appears, step through the wizard and choose the Primary Partition; then choose the appropriate size and drive letter. Finally, the wizard will ask you if you wish to format the new partition. You can choose between FAT32 and NTFS, the latter being a superior option.
Leave the Allocation Unit Size to default, and enter the drive letter in the Volume Label field. If you’re sure the drive has no problems, check “Perform a Quick Format”, otherwise leave it unchecked. Also, leave the Enable File and Folder Compression unchecked, and click Next to format the drive.
The wizard will now start formatting the drive; while it is formatting the drive, do not close the Computer Management window.
The formatting is complete when the status changes to ‘Healthy’ from ‘Formatting’. You may now use the newly formatted drive to store data.
Reformatting Your Hard Drive via the Command Line
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 <format D:>.
If you want to do a quick format on a particular drive, you should pass the Q parameter as well, for example, <format D: /Q>
