How to Reformat a Hard Drive

Reformatting your computer's hard drive is the final solution to any virus or technical problem, that your computer is facing. However, this should be the last resort. You should try all other procedures to eliminate the problem, before starting off with the formatting process. All the data stored in your hard drive is deleted, once it is formatted.

If you want to distribute the memory space in your hard disk in a different way or create drives with storage spaces, different from what is already present, then perhaps, reformatting your hard drive is the only option.

Reformatting the hard drive of your computer system can be done in various ways. For reformatting the hard drive without affecting the operating system, the task can be completed without using an operating system CD.

However, if you want to format the drive containing the operating system, then you should have a genuine copy of the operating system along with you, before starting off with the reformatting process.

The following are the steps that can guide you through the process of reformatting your hard drive. Please complete all the preliminary requirements, like taking a backup of your existing data, before starting off with the process.

• Right click on 'My Computer' and select 'Manage'.

• The window that provides you with the computer management options, will appear on your desktop. Click on the 'storage' tab.

• The graphical representation of the existing partitioned space will be displayed on selecting the 'storage' tab.

• Right click on one of the drives you want to reformat, and select 'delete'.

• Repeat the step for all the drives that you want to format.

• The drives which you have deleted will appear as free space in the graphical representation. Right click on the free space and select 'New Drive'.

• A wizard window will appear on your screen. Now, fill in the details, as asked by the wizard. You will have to mention information like, amount of space you wish to allocate to your new drive, and the type of filesystem (FAT or NTFS).

• Don't close the computer management window, until the new partition created shows its status as healthy.

• Repeat this process for as many drives as you want to create. The number of drives you can create, obviously depends on the amount of free space available.

The process mentioned here, can be used for reformatting the hard drive, if the operating system in use is Windows XP. In case of any other version of Windows, the process will be almost similar, but may have a slight variation in a few steps.

If your computer has Linux operating system installed, then this process of reformatting the hard disk, cannot be used. Linux has a different type of filesystem and the organization of the drives is done in a different way.