How To Format Your Hard Drive In Windows

#1 PCWorld

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Posted 08 February 2012 - 01:01 PM

Post your comments for How to Format Your Hard Drive in Windows here

#2 dansnelson

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Posted 13 February 2012 - 06:44 AM

"Formatting deletes all the data on a drive"

Wow, a complete misstatement at the very beginning of the article. Unless things have change radically in Windows 7, formatting most certainly does not delete data. It simply marks the sectors as available to be written on. If you simply format your drive, then donate or sell the computer without doing anything else, the new owner can retrieve much of your personal data with very simple, available tools.

And the ironic thing is, PC World periodically publishes cautionary articles on this exact subject. It'd be nice to get consistent stories. Does formatting truly delete data or not?

#3 zapazol

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Posted 14 February 2012 - 05:58 AM

The last paragraph says.......
What Formatting Doesn’t Do
Formatting doesn’t securely erase the contents of a hard drive. With freely available and easy-to-use tools, anyone can successfully recover data from a formatted drive. See How to Completely Erase a Hard Drive for information on wiping your hard drive clean.

So I believe the article answers *THAT* question.

#4 Nanukbcn

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Posted 30 December 2012 - 09:51 AM

I have a computer running perfectly well with Windows 7 and Mountain Lion, each installed in a separated SSD. I also have a HD to save files and wanted to make it usefull for both OS, so I made a partition with NTSF and another with exFat. Here started the problem, because now I can't start the computer.

I figured out it could be the hybrid format or something I did wrong during the process, so I want to reformat again, but I'm unable to locate the HD as I can't run any OS without unplugging it. Even if I plug when in Windows or ML, it wont read it.

So any ideas of how can I fix this?? Don't mind if I have to loose all info in the HD, because I backed up everything before.

#5 4421conlin

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Posted 04 January 2013 - 01:26 PM

I reformatted XP from the disc and the performance of the computer was only slightly improved. Speed on the internet is still very slow. Computer has 2 g ram which should produce better performance. Does anyone have any suggestions?