How to format your hard drive

When you format a computers hard drive you will lose everything that is on the drive. Therefore, it is very important to back up anything you might want later. Additionally, if you are going to be formatting and installing Windows you need to make sure you have the discs for any applications or third party hardware you use since you will need to re-install your programs and drivers after re-installing Windows.

A lot of people aren't sure they want to format their drives in case they ruin their system. Simply shut down your computer. now power it up and enter the system Bios. Change boot sequence to boot from CD/ROM (there are other ways to do this as well) Now exit the bios. Have your operating system disc in the drive and some prompts will come up asking you what to do. Simply follow the prompts and put in the discs as it requests. There are often a few different discs. The computer will tell you what disc to put in and when. During this process your hard drive can be formatted, operating system reinstalled and drivers installed. When you load windows for the first time on your formatted hard drive window update will most likely have a lot of updates to do. just let it do its thing. Any viruses or problems your computer had that weren't to do with its internal components should be fixed. You can do this in about an hour if you know how. Sometimes it takes longer though.