whats the difference between formating or completly deleteting it?

Question

my external hardrive is shown as RAW, i worked b4 but now doesn't workanymore, what is better formating or completly erasing it using teh software that came with teh hardrive disk

Answer 1

Your drive may have failed but in this case, it wouldn't really matter which you used. Using the software may make some additional diagnostics available. Hopefully it is a problem that a format will fix! good luck!

Answer 2

When installing a hard disk drive (commonly called a hard drive) for the first time, attempting to remove errors from your drive, getting rid of a nasty virus, or even cleaning a hard drive because you are selling or donating your computer -- those are just a few of the many reasons why one might consider formatting their hard drive.
Format actually means to prepare a storage medium, usually a disk, for reading and writing. When you format a disk, the operating system erases all bookkeeping information on the disk, tests the disk to make sure all sectors are reliable, marks bad sectors (that is, those that are scratched or otherwise damaged), and creates internal address tables that it later uses to locate information. You must format a disk (floppy or hard disk) before you can use it.

When you take a disk that has been formatted and run it through the format process again, it is referred to, logically, as "reformatting".

If you can access the data on your harddrive, back up anything important onto a CD-R or USB thumb drive. Once you format (clean) your hard drive you can import (put) the files back on.

Answer 3

rapid formatting is merely formating, wiping out the report tables so the sectors could be overwritten. customary formating helpful aspects a disk test to be sure if there are and undesirable sectors at thepersistent or disk media. it rather is time eating. to rather erase the counsel interior the sectors on the two rapid or wide-spread, you should run a gadget like Eraser to set the sectors back to all zeros. -tcw

Answer 4

you can do this thing that sends your computer back to a certain date and changes all of its settings back to what it was that day. i think its called system recovery.