Re-format your HD?

[FearTheAtlas]

I was wondering what the purpose of reformating your HD would be...and would it involve taking parts out of your computer?

[powdahound]

The purpose of it is to completely clean your computer off basically... Everything on your hard drive is deleted, including the operating system, allowing you to reinstall the things you want from scratch. You don't need to take anything out of your case either...

Over time computers become full of crap and starting clean is always nice. :)

[FearTheAtlas]

How would you go about doing this exactly?

[powdahound]

Depends on the OS... If you're using windows XP you can do it by booting off the CD (maybe in win2k too, but idk). Otherwise make a boot disk, boot to dos, and do "format c:" (where 'c' is the name letter of the drive you're going to format). Simple as that. :)

[FireWolf22]

You do need to insert the xp cd in before you power off the pc. But do not reinstall until after you have restarted the computer. I.E. place cd in cdrom. exit out of xp install window. restart computer. PC should automatically start the system load process. You have to tell the OS to delete the old partition. Then have it install Xp back on that partition. You will see what I am talking about when you try it. If You start the reinstall from desktop then you can't delete the partition and preform a complete reformat. 'Cause Windows makes a save of some system files and whe you try to delete the partition, it will not let you cause the files it made will be deleted. You have to delete this partition cause if you don't then the old files may(as they did with me on an upgrade from me to xp) remain on your hard drive and you are unable to access them unless you reinstall them.

Okay well I'm finished here ;)

Wolf

[FearTheAtlas]

I'm not that good with with stuff like this (Yes, I'm a n00b..sue me :() and I'm just making sure I don't fuck up my computer doing this...on my XP box it says Upgrade, does that mean that I have to find my Win98 disk, install that, THEN install XP and reformat? And a step-by-step would be nice :) sorry for bothering you lot :(

[Hikowa]

no just xp