defragmenting disk BEFORE OS reinstall??

I read on another chat forum a recommendation to defragment the harddrive before reformatting and reinstalling XP. Does that make sense???? I thought that if I reinstall and reformat the disk, disk fragmentation (which I presume is same as file fragmentation) essentially becomes a non-issue.

Can anybody confirm this or set me straight??

Cheers

Wodnik

 

make no sense.
If you reformat, then the index of files is GONE and the installer doesn't care where the data location is when it writes data, It just writes it. Defrag when you're done installing.

 

They may have been talking about a reinstall over an existing installation without formating although I see you say reformat and reinstall. When you install over an existing installation, is normally because of minor problems so in that case, if you can defrag, it would be good idea or at least a scan disk to check for and mark bad sectors on the drive.

 

Hey, Wodnik! ...

What happened to the other plan and the FDISK routine to get rid of the W2K and all that????

 

no hard feelings!

Wisewiz!

that's a 3rd machine I'm using. Your advice was applied to my W98/W2K desktop.

The XP reinstall was on my thinkpad ibm