REFORMATTING HARD DRIVE

[Barron797]

Can anyone recommend a book on how to reformat your hard drive? I am determined to do it myself. Any tips or advice would be greatly appreciated! Thanks in advance.

[Glynn R Harris]

Barron,
I hope you'll give us more info about what you are trying to do, and why.

Many of us here do formatting of hard drives on a regular basis, no different than the way you would format a floppy. Less commonly, but still pretty trivial, using FDISK to partition drives FOR formatting, and just sort of "erasing" a drive so no trace of our mistakes http://sysopt.earthweb.com/forum/wink.gif remain.

If you mean the factory low-level formatting, there are many IDE drives where this cannot be easily done by the user, simply because the electronics of the drive is meant to write and read data, but not write servo information or even deliver that information out the port. IDE drives are of the philosophy that the higher-level functionality is all you as a user require.

But if you need to do low-level work, maybe you are recovering a damaged drive or whatever... there maybe someone on here who does data recovery for a living and can enlighten you on that black magic.

In general, if all you want is a "clean slate", then that's something easily handled within the DOS/Win9x/NT environments... be a bit more specific, and the replies will be more step-wise.

[Barron797]

Thanks Glynn, for your response. I just want a clean slate (similar to how many others format their hard drives on a regular basis for optimal performance.) My drivers are whacked and my computer is somewhat unstable so I thought that formatting and starting from scratch will eliminated most of my problems. I hope that is specific enough.....I am a novice so I'm not too sure if I should even be doing this myself. Thanks again!

[codybear]

http://www.pcnineoneone.com/howto/clean1.html

[DEMENTEDEVIL]

Or you can go to www.firingsquad.com (http://www.firingsquad.com) for more info, they have a nice guide on how to do it all....

[Barron797]

You guys are awesome. Thanks for the suggestions! I sincerely appreciate it.

[jad1097]

Both are great links.

Here is a more direct one to DEMENTEDEVIL's link. http://firingsquad.gamers.com/guides/hdmyths/default.asp

[Dmass]

Many of us have continually upgraded Windows from 3.1 to Win98. There is a good chance that when you do your format and start your re-installation process you'll be required to prove that you have a original version of Windows. This is when you will actually have to insert your 6 original floppys of Win 3.1. You better be sure you have them or you'll be up the creek. Also, eventually your system gets so messed up you WILL HAVE TO RE-FORMAT the HDD. I recently did it because when I upgraded to a Vortex 2 sound card I had many problems. You won't find this info in too many places so keep these tips handy. FYI I did get 3 years out of HDD before I had to re-format, so you don't have to worry. I isn't something you do everyday. Good luck.