I want to reformat my laptop hard drive. What precautions and steps should I take?
921077
Honestly if you are trying to fix your computer, reformatting it will only wipe the data off of the hard drive, there is a lot more to fixing the PC than formatting the hard drive.\nIf you want to 'fix' the laptop by wiping it out and installing XP fresh, then the best way is to boot from the XP CD you got with the laptop. Some laptop don't ship with CDs now, you have to make them (using a utility included with the OS), buy them from the company, or access a hidden partition containing the discs (usually pressing F6 before the windows boot screen)
656915
do not sell the hard drive with the computer!\n\ndata can still be retrieved even if you reformat.  in order to make the drive safe for sale you will need a "data shredding program".  this requires that you install the hard drive into a second computer, shred the data, then re-install it into the computer for sale.\n\nbest practice:  sell it without the hard drive.
932197
the same way as you do it for an internal HD. go to My Computer, right click the drive and select Format.
281733
If you are using it on another computer of your own, just plug it in as a slave drive and then if using Win XP, just go to My Computer and right click on the drive. Then select format and it will wipe it clean for you. \n\nIf you are just going to install windows on it then just format at windows setup.\n\nIf you are not going to be the user of this computer and want to protect your privacy use a tool from http://www.download.com to do a deep format - one in which data cannot be recovered.\n\nGood Luck
1048042
there is no way to do it if format hard drive doesn't work
865614
Best thing to do is to completely re-format the drive and then re-install the software that you want to use.  By re-formatting, it destroys ALL of the data on the Hard Drive and allows you to 'start with a clean slate' when installing the software of YOUR choice...
915231
You'll need to boot to something other than that hard drive - such as a windows CD, a Win98 boot floopy (google it) or a Linux CD.  You can then format the hard drive, which will erase the entire contents of it.\n\nYou can also put the hard drive in another computer and format it that way.
890405
Reformat and reload you hard drive.\n\nCoach
1077986
You can use a program like CCleaner (freeware) and manually uninstall all of your programs. You can then reformat the drive. If you perform an OS reinstall, don't select repair. Reinstall the OS fresh, and that will remove everything and start over.
928886
to reformat an external drive\nplug it into your pc\nrigh click on the drive icon\nselect format
649466
Formatting would be your best bet. Though there are certain commercial softwares which do this for you and then rewrite junk on the drive so that all previous info is lost but since nothing important is there a simple reformat would do. In order to do it you would have to boot into the command prompt. if you are using a certain brand like Dell or HP they have system restore which allows you to reset your computer to the day you bought it thus in effect starting out on a clean slate for any new user.\nI would personally recommend this(provided of course you have this feature)\n\nCheck out the link on Cnet about deleting data, it also has some links for softwares which will help you erase your HardDisk.
1026760
Get all your files off of it that you want to keep, then reformat/reinstall the operating system
835743
Plug the drive in, right click My computer and choose manage, detect the drive, and format it NTFS or FAT32
733776
If you have a HP or Dell (& others I'm not aware of) then systems like these have options to set it back to factory settings, erasing all the junk you accumulate along the way.  However if you don't have the recovery disks it prompts you to create then don't do it.  Reformatting involves wiping everything from the hard drive and to get your pc working again you will need an operating system disk like windows XP or Vista (if your computer is powerful enough and when it's out)  If you are unsure or don't know anyone to do it for you, ask a local computer shop if they will install an operating system for you after you have formatted the drive.
31383
1. Wipe harddrive\n2. Install Windows 2000 or XP\n3. Wonder why you didn't do this sooner
707255
You'll have to remove the old hard drive, but it's really not that hard... on the back of your laptop should be a bunch of panels that come off... under one of them is the harddrive. Unscrew and VIOLA, you've got all your data... Now go buy a $3.00   adapter from ebay and you're set... When you buy, you're looking for a 2.5" USB HD enclosure... what'll pretty much happen is you're gonna turn your old HD into an external HD, kinda like athumb drive. I suck at giveing explanations.... send me an email at mdd345@hotmail.com if you need any help or have any other questions...
44426
You can format the hard drive by taking the disk that came with it and putting it in at start up. Doing this will wipe out EVERYTHING on the computer.