Why do people reformat their harddrive? PLEASE HELP???

Question

Is it the same as Master Reboot to factory settings?

If not, wht are they doing and why?

Answer 1

It is standard procedure for a new drive or partition.

For an existing drive (HDD) Something has terribly gone wrong with the data or OS in the HDD and it could not be fixed but HDD is still in good shape. Could be due to a virus, malware or perhaps electrical abnormalities or spikes.

Reformatting should be a last resort if you have important files in your HDD. After removing virus or malware and there is a need to repair windows, you could consider the option in this link:

http://www.informationweek.com/shared/printableArticle.jhtml?articleID=189400897

Hope this helps.

Answer 2

There ya go, a good question... You see, there are phases of formating. May I preech? Please open your bibles to the book of Storage Media, Chapter 7 verse 16, and it reads....

Harddrives are built in a vaccum consisting of 4 major parts, Platters (Metal Chemical Disks affixed to an axle that is connected to part #2), the Drive Motor. A high torgue 12vdc motor rotates the platters as speeds between 4500-7200rpm for standard IDE drives.
The cylinders are brought up to speed and then the heads run acrossed the drive (3rd part) which control data storage and access at the bare beginning phases of useage.

All of this is neatly encased in an air tight vaccum sealed encasement that houses the Drive Interface Controller Board. (#4) This is the bridge between the power and data cables and the content on the drive and it's capacity itself.

To prep the drive for use in an electronic device, it needs to be essentially blank and for all intents and purposes, unused. To do this, the hard drive manufactures used to use a method called Low Level Formatting. This is where the hard disk drive would physically write, erase, and re-write 0's to the entire drive. This low level operation was no longer needed in modern IDE drives. However, a 0'ing of the drive is still a commonly performed task and is so much like a low level, the name carried over.

Again, a Low Level or Full Zero Format means to write the drive as new, Deleting all partitions and data.

Next there is the Full Format. The name is misleading but it's called a full format as an alternative to it's counterpart, the Quick Format which we'll cover in a second.

To understand these two formatting types, we need to identify part of your question, the Why part.

Before an Operating System such as Windows can be installed onto a hard disk drive, or even using it as random storage, you must partition the drive. To partition (known among techs as FDisking) is to assign a planned operating use and size allocations. Once a partition has been created, upon the next reboot, the drive will be accessible for use in the intended OS platforms. For example, if you FDisked using a Windows CD, you made a partition for use with either Windows or MS DOS. However if you did it from a Linux CD, then the Hard Disk is setup to use data for a Unix based OS.

Now that is why there are different Format types. But Why still has to be answered properly.

When you partition your drive for use with Windows, you must FORMAT it for 1st time use. This format is much like a low level except it is prepping the drive for it's method of using it's resources.

A Full Format is required the first time and physically writes to every section of the drive.

A Quick Format just writes a notation to the Table of Contents for that drive to emulate an empty, free to use, hard drive. Viruses exploit this whenever possible and that is why a Full Format is often performed where a quick format would have usually worked.

Formating is used for other reasons, Imagine a chalkboard at school, after a while the teacher fills it up with notes and stuff, what does she do? She erases it and goes at it again. Okay, that's a format, a quick format. A full format is if she broke out the water too.

Other times, a format is needed to iron out a confused location on the drive that is preventing normal and reliable operation.

Many times, you just want to redo your stuff. Maybe someone gave you a computer and they have porn and junk popping up, you're bored copying it all to cd and you want to start from scratch, first thing you do is QUICK FORMAT THE DRIVE.

Oh man a Super Duper Senjiah Virus is on my $hit... FULL/LOW LEVEL FORMAT!!!!

Windows want's to install, FULL/QUICK FORMAT...

Again, many many reasons. And now you know why and when to use each kind.

Teach a man to fish, right?

Answer 3

if your p.c is infected by a virus, then you better have to formatte your hard disk. because the virus that affects your computer, wil do some strange things. so to get rid of the virus problem you have to formatte it.

Answer 4

formatting is done prior to a reinstallation, to remove everything on a computer's hard disk so that one gets a computer software that functions as good as new