formating computer

S

stepankhotulev

New Member
hi,
ive got a acer aspire laptop, ive made some mistakes, and my laptop is full of different crap, and errors now. I want to format it completly. i want it to be as it was when i bought it. i heared formating hard disk is not enought

help me please
 
Once you format a drive in a laptop or desktop that has a preinstalled OS you lose the recovery partition information on many makes. If you have a full install disk and board cd for those needed drivers/softwares you are safe to proceed. Often you have to contact support for a download link to reinstall the OS on a drive. They provide a link for downloading the disk images to burn to cd-rs when you validate purchase of one of their systems there. Otherwise you try to locate the needed drivers before cleaning the drive.

A sure fire way to thoroughly clean a drive is called zero filling(writing binary zeros) the drive totally. This means nothing remains at all. You will then have to create a totally new partition and format that for the operating system that will be used. The XP installer has the ability to this as well as other drive tools available. For Active Killdisk you would need a cd writer available to burn the iso image or download the zip file for creating a boot floppy. These are available at http://www.killdisk.com/downloadfree.htm

Zero filling on the older 9X and dos machines used to take forever! This one works fast but when it does there's no recovery for files and folders later!
 
trying to hide the dodgy sites from the mother/police?
i can only suggest the above. you can also try booting into DOS and typing FDISK, this lets you create, delete and split partitions. it also lets you enable/disable large capacity support.
 
That depends on which version of fdisk is used there. The original fdisk seen on 98 for instance will max out at 64gb. That is far from useful on the larger 160gb ide/sata to 750gb sata drives now commonly seen on newer builds. The updated fdisk would work on drives upto about 250gb. Western Digital came out with their own DRFAT32 with the obvious drawback of being Fat32 formatted there.

GParted Live for cd will handle any drive for partitioning. The formatting is then performed by either the OS's installer or a format tool for that particular OS. XP has it's own disk management tool for converting Fat into NTFS so that is covered there. For a full description of using 98's version and a link for the update for upto 64gb, http://members.bellatlantic.net/~mrscary/fdisk.htm

But besides being a Fat32 tool there XP has it's own tools for deletion and creating new primary partitions included in the installer. Once you enter the install now option with XP you simply choose the "L" option after highlighting the existing partition and then choose the "D" for deletion on the next screen. There you will see a prompt to confirm it's deletion. This is when using the full install disk for the most part unless you are going through the install older version to upgrade process with an upgrade only disk. Far better off when using a full install cd for this.
 
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