How to Format a Hard Drive

How to Format Your Hard Drive

You had a long day at work; the traffic is bumper to bumper on the freeway. You are almost home and you get pulled over and cited a speeding ticket. You finally get home and get on your computer to research some lawyers to get out of that speeding ticket and your computer seems to be not acting right. Well it is time to format the hard drive.

If you are like most computer owners, you understand how frustrating and expensive a computer can be. Taking your computer to the repair shop and paying high technician fees can be a thing of the past. Follow my directions and you will not ever have to worry about keeping your computer running again.

Before you begin, you need to have a computer and a basic understanding of how it operates. You will need a few 3.5-inch floppy disks, a startup disk, and an operating system disk. The startup disk is a disk that was made especially for your computer. It tells the computer what hardware it has and which type of operating system is going to be installed.

The operating system disk is, for most personal home computers, Microsoft Windows. Today the Windows versions would most likely be Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows 98 S.E., Windows ME, Windows 2000, or Windows X.P. If you have the floppy disks, the startup disk and the operating system disk then you are ready for the next step.

Now, you need to decide which (if any) information you do not want erased. This information will be saved on a 3.5-inch floppy. To save on a 3.5-inch floppy you need to insert the disk into the skinny hole on your tower making sure to keep the shiny side down. The drive that you inserted the disk into is called the A-drive. After your disk is inserted into the A-drive open the file you wish to save. Click on the word file and a drop down menu appears. On the drop down menu you will see a list of options. Click on save as. Another window will open and ask you where you would like to save the file and what you would like to name it. Type the name of the file and click on A-drive 3.5 floppy. Do this with everything that you do not want to lose. When you have finished saving, take a deep breath.

Now you are ready to format your hard drive. The next two steps scare most people. Do not worry; if you have saved all the information correctly; this should be no problem. To format your hard drive, start by clicking on the start button. Next, click on shutdown. Finally, click on start in D.O.S. mode. The computer will shut down and restart. It will restart in D.O.S. mode, which means that all you will see on your screen is a c-prompt. A c-prompt is the letter c followed by a colon, a backslash, the word Windows, and an arrow pointing to the right. It should look like this “c:>.” The curser should be blinking to the right of the arrow. Type in CD followed by two periods. The command looks like this “C:> cd..” Cd tells your computer that you want to change the directory. Now, your c-prompt should look like this “c:.” Let's format!

At your c: or c-prompt type format c:.