Is it easy to reformat a hardrive?

[Indiana]

Fellas,

Could someone tell me how to reformat my harddrive and restore it to factory settings? I have been waiting on the phone for tech support for like an hour to no avail. Basically the viruses and pop-ups and startup programs have made the machine just about unusable.

Thanks in advance,

Indy

[Nepa]

Put the restore CD in the Drive and reboot. If i doesn't Boot off the the CD you may have to change a setting in your BIOS.

[TheTROLL]

This won't cure the problem for long, you need to read up on anti-spyware and antivirus software, there have been plenty of threads on here with recommendations. It's very rarely necessary to reinstall from scratch because of this stuff.

[AngryCola]

Formatting the main drive and completely reinstalling Windows is fairly regular maintenance for me. I do it about once a year. No matter what you do, Windows crap always builds up over time.

I suppose you could say that one should never have to do it for the particular problems with spyware. There's almost always a utility out there to fix those problems. But if you know what you're doing, a format would certainly clear up everything in your system. Of course, you should make sure to keep your system more protected from spyware/adware/etc. after you format it if you've had problems with spyware in the past.

Having said all that, people shouldn't try manual formats unless they have a pretty good idea of what they are doing.

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Having said all that, people shouldn't try manual formats unless they have a pretty good idea of what they are doing.

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Why not? It's not like they can do any harm. They're formatting because they're fed up with the spywar and junk so let's assume that they've already backed up their data. If they manually format from DOS or the prompt all they have to do is reboot and stick their XP disc or whatever OS they are running in the CD drive, and they're good to go. It will install fine.

[TheTROLL]

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Windows crap always builds up over time.

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This needn't be the case at all. I don't know quite what you mean my "Windows crap", but I find by periodically uninstalling software I no longer need and running various maintenance utilities (regclean, defrag etc) I can keep a PC in good-as-new condition until the OS becomes outdated or the hardware fails or isn't up to a new task I need to run.

Easily worth the few minutes a month to avoid the time cost of reformatting and reinstalling everything. If you can't/won't do that, at least look into a Ghost-type product so you can reimage your HDD rather than rebuilding from scratch.

[Indiana]

My cpu is so phucked that I can't even reinstall Win 98 and clean it up. I was up till 2am with Dell last night. I bought a new CPU from best buy yesterday so I plan to use the Win XP disks from the new computer to upload the OP system to my old cpu. Its the only way they said.

Indy

[MyMindIsGoing]

Please tell me this is not true.

[TheTROLL]

A support droid saying something stupid? That's surprising how? /images/graemlins/mad.gif

[MyMindIsGoing]

"My cpu is so phucked"
It can never be that phucked.

"I can't even reinstall Win 98 and clean it up."
Win 98 is not a good choice of a OS. There is no reason to use it at all.

"I was up till 2am with Dell last night."
Calling support is just a waste of time.

"I bought a new CPU"
Won't do any good at all, waste of money.

"I plan to use the Win XP disks from the new computer to upload the OP system to my old cpu"
Will not work very good at all, bad solution.

"Its the only way they said."
They are wrong, very wrong.

This is not a flame post, just the truth.

[TheTROLL]

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"I bought a new CPU"
Won't do any good at all, waste of money.


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Hmm, I *think* he means CPU in the completely mistaken sense of "the bit that isn't the monitor or the printer", rather than the actual chip...

[MyMindIsGoing]

I think so too, either way it is a bad choice.