How to Easily Format a Hard Drive

Published On: February 21st, 2012|Last Updated: January 7th, 2023|Categories: Tech News|Total Views: 1472|Daily Views: 1|
Are you going to install any operating system, then wait a minute. Because before installing any operating system into your hard drive, its recommended to format the hard drive. This can help to get rid of viruses and unresolved issues. All OS should be installed in the fresh hard disk only, So read this instructions to make your format simple:

Preparation

  1. If you format your hard drive, all the contents in the hard drive will get deleted, So before formatting make sure that you have taken complete back up of important data.
  2. After formatting, not only your contents alone will get erased, but also you will lose all the applications and drivers installed. So re-install all the drivers and applications after installing any OS.
  3. While taking back up, don’t forget to take back up of My Documents, desktop contents and bookmarks in the browsers.
  4. Take back up in pen drive, CD or DVD which didn’t get formatted.

Formatting a Secondary Hard Drive

  1. Right click on My Computer icon in desktop or Start menu and select Manage from the list OR type compmgmt.msc in the Run window. A new window opens with title Computer Management.
  2. Just Click Disk Management from Storage in the left hand side. Make sure that you are clicking the local Disk management link.
  3. Then you can see all your hard drives in the lower right side of the window. All hard drives will get listed one by one with color box for showing the different partitions in each hard drive.
  4. Select which of the hard drive you need to format and right-click on that particular drive and click Delete partitions to delete the partition. If you want to format only one drive, then format that one partition and leave all the remaining partitions as it is. If you taken back up of all the data then ignore all the warnings and confirm.
  5. After that you can find the unallocated blank space in your hard drive. Right click the unallocated space and select New Partition to make new partition in your drive. In the New partition window, click next and select Primary Partition in the next window and again click next. Set maximum disk size and click next. Then select the drive letter from the drop down list and click next.
  6. In the last window, you need to format the partition, so that make sure to set the following parameters and click Finish.
    • Set file system as NTFS, because it is more fast and secure than FAT and FAT32.
    • Leave Allocation Unit Size as default
    • If you need to give any name for partition then give it in Volume Label.
    • If your hard drive is already used then uncheck the Perform a quick format option, else check it.
    • Uncheck the Enable file and folder compression.
  7. Then wait till new partition gets created. You can know it once the formatting text changes to Healthy, till don’t close the current window. Once it changed to Healthy, then you can use your new formatted drive.

Leave A Comment