Formating the hardrive

I hear so many people talking about this. Is it just taking everything of the drive? So could I like backup everything then format the drive then reinstall everything? Wouldent that clear up a lot of crap?

 

You guys talk about it and dont know how?

 

not sure what your question is. If yoour installing XP, then star is right, if you are installing a different os, then you should fdisk, and reformat........need more info.

 

I use low level format to clean out everything on harddrive. My harddrive is maxtor, I use maxpower or powermax from their site and extracted to floppy disk then boot on floppy. I enter options menu and select low level format, let it run all night. It takes couple of hours. In morning, I restart my computer and install win xp. I am planning to format my harddrive maybe this week cuz of an error on my window relate to system information that I couldnt fix it and no one know why or how to fix it. So format and reinstall is only answer to problems that cant be fixed. Low level format clean out all clusters and everything, it better than basic format using your boot disk. I dont know if Toshiba have tools for low level format, u could check their site.

 

hve you posted that problem in here Johner?

 

yep here
www.majorgeeks.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=8427

 

I thought low level formatting pretty much disappeared when IDE drives became the standard. Is it even necessary on modern drives? What is the benefit?

 

the drives come low leveled when you buy them and there really isn't any need to low level it again unless you have some severe reason to do so.

 

make a boot disk.
REstart, type FDISK at the prompt, delete partition, then create a partition.
REboot, type FORMAT C: at the prompt, do it, its formatted.
Put in the win98 cd. Type D: (or E, Or R, etc), then type setup. Follow the instrucitons.

 

Okay, thanks.