Reformatting Hard Drive

When viruses populate your hard drive and there is no way you can get rid of them, you are left with only one choice. You must reformat your hard drive and erase all previous data to wipe the proverbial slate clean and start again. The process of reformatting hard drive is extremely simple and it can be completed quite easily by any one. The aim of this article is to clearly explain some of the ways to format hard drive and reclaim your computer’s storage space.
What is Hard Drive Formatting?
Before I share some computer hard drive reformatting tips, let us see what exactly is formatting or reformatting a hard drive. Formatting a hard drive is establishing a file system on it for reading and writing of data. A manufacturer formats your computer hard drive for you, when computer operating system installation is carried out for the first time. This is done after adding hard drive to PC.
Any subsequent reformatting of the hard drive and reinstallation of an operating system is called reformatting. When you reformat a hard drive, all the bad sectors created over a period of time are noted down and excluded from usage. A new address table is created, which facilitates the access to stored data. Let us now take a look at the procedure for reformatting hard drives on Windows and Mac based machines. Here’s how to reformat a hard drive.
Reformatting Hard Drive On Windows Machines
Let us see how to format a hard drive on Windows machines. If you want to reformat the entire disk, including the volume with installed Windows OS, you need a recovery disk or installation disk of Windows XP, Windows Vista or Windows 7. Before you go for a complete reformat of the hard drive, a back up exercise that will transfer and copy your data to an external data storage device. To reformat the entire hard drive, insert the installation disk in your optical drive. Your computer will boot from the installation DVD.
Choose the install OS option and you will be asked to choose the drive volume on which you want the OS installed. A list of volumes on the hard drive, with used and free space information will be displayed. There you will find an option to format any hard drive volume.
So choose the volume that you want to erase and it will be formatted, after you have chosen a file system for it (NTFS is recommended). Then you can run a fresh reinstallation of Windows XP, Windows, Windows Vista or Windows 7. For more details, refer to this article which explains how to reinstall Windows.
To reformat any volume, other than the installed OS volume, just go to ‘My Computer’. You will see a list of all volumes that are part of the hard drive. Right click on the volume, which you want formatted, select the file system and execute the ‘format’ command to wipe out all data and get a fresh volume, with all free storage space. Check out this article on formatting hard drive in DOS.
Reformatting Hard Drive On Mac
Let us now take a look at the procedure for reformatting hard drive on Mac systems. To format any of the partitioned drive volumes, open the ‘Disk Utility’ program provided in Mac OS X. A list of all the hard drive partitions will be visible in the left pane. Choose the partition volume, which you want formatted and select the ‘Erase’ tab at the top. Choose a type of file system for that volume (Mac OS X Journal is recommended) and hit the erase button, to get the volume formatted.
If you want to erase the entire hard drive clean you will need a Mac OS X installation disk. Load it, boot from it and follow instructions to format all data. Then you can run a fresh reinstallation of Mac OS X.
As you can see, reformatting hard drive is quite a simple and straightforward job, when you have the Windows or Mac OS X operating system installation disk. Just make sure that you back up all of your important data, before going for a reformat as every bit of it, which exists on the volume you format, will be wiped out. You can use an external hard drive to transfer your data and then go for a reformat. Go for a disk defragmentation routine once in a while and install an antivirus software, which will eliminate the need for you to go for a frequent reformatting exercise.

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