Want to re-format your pc/hard-drive?

Sarah_Bunni · Jul 24, 2010

Introduction:

This guide will teach you how to reformat your P.C/Hard-Drive.

1) Formatting your computer hard-drive will cause you to lose everything that was on that drive.
Therefore you will want to back up anything that you may need or want later down the road.
-Take some time and think of anything that may be on your computer that you might
wish to save. General assumptions would presume mostly the stuff in your ''My Documents''
folder. You may also wish to save some of your favorite sites or bookmarks in your web
browser.
2) Save everything that you wish to keep on a CD, DVD or a hard-drive that you won't be formatting.
(flash-drives will work perfectly without the problems of a miss-placed CD or etc.

Formatting a secondary hard drive:
1) First right-click on the ''My Computer'' icon either on your desktop or in the start menu and select ''Manage''.

2) A new window titled ''Computer Management'' comes up. Select ''Storage'' from the left hand side
by clicking on it one time. Then select ''Disk Management (Local)'' from the right side by double-clicking
on it.

3) Now in the lower part of the frame (right side) of the window you will see a nice visual of all of you
hard drives. Each line is a different drive. Each box on a line (with a colored bar and a size displayed
in MB or GB) is a partitition. Partitions are seperations of space on a drive.

4) First you must delete any existing partitions on the drive you are going to format. Do this by right-clicking
on the partition's box and selections ''Delete Partition...'' since you already know you will be deleting everything
on the drive, and have already backed everything up.

5) The box for the drive to be formatted should now have a black bar near the top of it and should
say unallocated under it's size, right-click on it and select new partition. The new partition wizard
should come up.

6) In the new partition wizard click next, on the next page make sure the ''Primary Partition''
is selected and click next. Make the size equal to the maximum (it should already be set to it)
and click next agian. on the next page your computer with automatically choose the first available
drive drive letter for the new drive. However, if you wish you may choose another drive letter from
the ''drop-down'' menu. Then select ''Next''.

7) Finially the new partition wizard will ask if you would like to format a new partition and if so......
what format and if so what format. Choose ''NTFS'' as it is faster and more secure. Leave
''Allocation Unit Size'' as ''Default'' in the ''Volume Label'' field enter whatever name you want drive
to have. Simple generally would be better. Avoid using spaces. Lastly, if the drive is brand new and
and has never been used before check the "Perform a quick format" box. If the drive has been used
before leave this box unchecked. Leave the "Enable file and folder compression" box unchecked and
click next. Then on the next page click finish.

8) The wizard will now spend a little while formatting the drive. On old or large drives this may take a while.
Do not close the "Computer Management" window until it finishes. You will know it is done when the word
under the size of the drive changes from "Formatting" to "Healthy" and the name and drive letter you chose
for the new drive show up. After it is finished you can proceed to use your newly formatted drive.