How do you re-format a hard drive?

[boing]

Hi i've got so many little bugs creeping into my system i was thinking of just re-formatting my drive but have never done it before, is it reasonably straightforward and if so could someone fill me in on how to do it?

Also having read a bit about partitioning your drive i was thinking of giving this a go to keep the OS 'clean' in the future and put all my net downloads in one area, does this prevent viruses ect from accessing other partitions?

 

[Biggs]

Try this for starters,

Anandtech FAQ

Cheers!

 

[Muadib]

If all you want to do is format, then all you need is a boot disk. Test the boot disk, and make sure you can access your cd rom drive. Once you are sure the disk works, you can format the C drive like so:

format C: /s

This will format the drive, and make it bootable.

To partition, first make a boot disk. Then reboot your pc using the boot disk to make sure it works. Once you boot to your A drive, make sure you can access your cd rom drive. Then, run fdisk, and say yes to the question about large disk. You should then see the menu. I would advise looking at the way your disk is now before you do anything, which is the last option.

Your next step is to delete the current partitions. Use the view option to make sure you delete them all. Now you need to make new partitions. Be sure to make the primary partition active.

 

[bacillus]

Muadib, you seem to be assuming he's using a win9x OS!

 

[boing]

Yeah, sorry i should have said, i'm using win 98 so that should be ok, thanks guys

 

[Muadib]

Originally posted by: bacillus
Muadib, you seem to be assuming he's using a win9x OS!

Somehow, I just knew.

 

[Barrei]

I have reformatted several times but the way I did it I reinstalled win98 as I wanted to customize win98 as there are some things I don't use therefore I didn't want them on my hard drive, if you have a win 98 cd for a NEW PC here is how I did it , first insert Win 98 into cdrom,{ when the cd trys to play Win 98 just hit x when win 98 screen come up } then go into bios and then go to Advanced Cmos , rearrange boot order to #1 cd rom , #2 IDE -0 , #3 floppy , hit escape , screen will come up and ask if you want to save put in "y" and press enter , screen will come up and you have 5 seconds to pick the option that says " to take off from c.d. " after you have chosen that a screen will come up that says A:> you will type in D:\>cd space win98 { you don't type in the word space you hit space on keyboard } and press enter , then go D:\Win98>format space C: screen says "Warning all data will be lost" , pick Y and press enter on keyboard , from here on computer will do all the reformatting of your hard drive from the Win 98 cd you had put in earlier , screen will show a percentage complete sign when it reaches 100% ,then unplug your computer for a few seconds and plug it back in and boot it up, it will reinstall Win 98 from the cd in the cdrom { I personally don't unplug it but for you it will be the simplest way to do it } this way if you didn't like some things in windows before you can customize it for what you want. After Win98 has been reinstalled go into bios , advanced cmos and rearrange boot order back to #1 floppy , #2 ide-0 , #3cdrom .

 

[Paulson]

This is the way I always format my computer...

First, I get my one disk does everything (win98 startup disk) and get to the prompt... and type in FDISK... in fdisk I delete the non-dos partition (or for you it'd be dos partiton if running windows 9x...)

Then, I create a partition... get my win98se install disk, shove it in the cd-rom, restart, and run setup... win98se setup automatically asks to format your hard drive... if you want to continue on w/win98se installation, keep going, if you're putting on Win2K, then swap disks and then you're set...

 

[Zukatah]

I'm using the idiot proof winxp installation cd =)