Tips for Reformatting Your Hard Drive

Let me start by stating that everyone should learn to reformat their hard drive. Whether you accidentally opened a suspicious email or visited some questionable sites, one of the main reasons to reformat your hard drive is when you have too many viruses on your computer. Another reason is that your drives may be running slow. Although this may be due to too much content, it can also be because your drive just needs to "reset", especially because Windows is said to gradually corrupt itself over time.

Reformatting is really a last ditch effort sort of thing, though it could easily be the first thing you do so you don't have to deal with all the trial and error of fixing a virus. Also, you should be aware that reformatting will delete all of your files and software that is not part of the base operating system. This means you should try to back up all of your documents and save your software licenses. Finally, this is for Windows XP and before. I have no and don't want any experience with Windows Vista.

To start off, insert your Windows disk into the drive, and set your computer to boot from that drive. Some laptops are automatically set to boot from disk as a default, but if your computer is not, you may need to go to the bios to change the boot device priority setting. Just set your disk drive to the first boot position, save, then let your computer reboot itself.

Once your computer boots from disk it will load up Windows. Select your partition and delete it. You will need to confirm this twice, but once you do, the partition should say something like "unpartitioned space." At this point, install a new copy of XP onto that partition. Accept the EULA and then format it using the NTFS file system. You can choose the quick setup, but I usually don't mostly because I don't trust Windows to not forget something important.

At this point the setup is pretty much on autopilot. Depending on your system, this process may take around an hour. As Windows sets up, it will prompt you for different settings, and you can just fill them in to your preference. At the very end, Windows will reboot, and you have to enter your user settings.

After the Windows setup is complete, reinstall your drivers, software, and docs. Your computer should be good to go, though, I recommend downloading the latest Windows updates and virus definition files.