Formatting A Computer Hard Drive

Video Transcript

"Now it says, “what would you like to do”, what we need to do is format the hard drive. Formatting basically wipes out everything on the hard drive. Imagine taking a dirty plate and then scrubbing it clean. Now that it’s clean you can put new food on it. It’s basically the same option here, we’re going to take a hard drive that has old Windows on it, wipe it clean and install brand new Windows on it. And that is my first option, format the partition using NTSF file system and we want to do it quick. Our next screen has two options, to format this drive press “F”, to select a different partition press “Escape”. In a sense it’s almost giving you a lot of steps to say are you sure you want to do this? Are you really sure you want to do this? Are you positive you want to do this? If you don’t feel like you want to do this, you can actually back out and say “Escape, Escape” have someone else do this for me. If you feel that this is what I really want to do and I want to wipe out my hard drive and let XP reinstall itself, this is the last step. This is the end. Now if you feel that you don’t want to press the button, you can have someone else press the button so then you won’t take responsibility for it. So I’m about to press the button, the “F” key. What it’s doing right now is it’s about to format your hard drive. While it is formatting your hard drive it is going to be wiping out your operating system. This would not be a good time to say I don’t want to do this, it’s already happening and it’s going to wipe out your hard drive. So you’re going to see right now this screen and a red bar is going to come up with a little cross. Once that does happen, and really quickly, what’s going to happen is actually the computer is going to reboot it self. That means restart again and once it restarts again the Windows takes over and starts installing all the operating system on your computer. Now here on the right hand side you can see that it’s actually copying certain files that it needs; true type fonts, DLL files, basically everything that it needs to run the computer. Please wait while setup copies files to the Windows installation folders. This might take several minutes. Usually formatting a hard drive can take about forty-five minutes it depends on the speed of your computer. This is an older computer, it’s a Pentium 3 we are using for an example, the newer computers that have like two to four gigabytes of RAM, this would probably take about fifteen minutes maybe less, an older computer forty-five minutes, give or take, it depends. Once it’s going through this process it’s going to reboot its self or basically the computer is going to restart so actually you really don’t need to do a lot. In the next segments I’m going to show you the prompts you have to follow but you really don’t have to do a lot, it does it for you automatically. "