Format hard drive guide

Format Hard Drive

Format hard drive is one of the serious decisions, which a computer owner takes. Many people store their important information and files in their hard disk. However, due to burden of useless files and software, one may take the decision to remove the junk from his/her hard disk.

Before we format the drive, we must make a back up of our important files and folders. Once the hard disk is formatted, then all of the data on the disk surface will be removed.

Some people have different partitions on their hard disk, so they can easily copy their important files from one drive to another, and easily remove their files.

However, some have only one partition in their computer (this is generally the majority of computer users) so we must back up our files before we format our hard disk.

We can format hard drive several ways.

• With Ms DOS prompt.
• With a bootable windows CD.
• By right clicking the desired drive form my computer.

I am going to explain the first 2 of the above given methods one by one.

1. Format hard drive from MS DOS prompt.

If we have one partition on our hard disk then we can easily format our hard disk. Logging on to the DOS prompt by restarting or by windows, and by writing the following command, we can easily format our hard disk. (Suppose that we are going to format our D drive.

C:/>format D:

After typing the above command, our computer will warn us that we will lose all data by formatting the drive. If you want to continue then press Enter, or ESC to quit.

After pressing the enter key, the process of formatting the hard disk will start automatically. During this process, our computer will show us the percentage of the process, and also, ask us for the Volume label up to 11 characters.

We can also format a floppy disk with the same command by just typing

C:/>format a:The rest of the process is the same.

2. Format hard drive with the help of bootable CD

The process is simmilar, the difference is that we have to boot our hard disk with a bootable cd. The commands are also the same, we just have to reach the CD drive then in the window folder (of bootable cd) type the same command.

Windows Xp users – Simply reboot with the cd and it is automatic. The cd gives you options, and you select the desired options. Windows Xp makes formatting even easier, as all the options are on the cd, no typing of commands is needed. The windows cd will delete any correct windows, sorting your file system in to either fat 32 or ntfs. You then simply reinstall windows Xp.

You can see a guide to this in my windows XP install section.

Please note this is a guide – please read our site terms of use. We are not held responsible for any damage or loss of data.

Article posted by Sarfaraz - Pakistan

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