How to Reset a Computer's Hard Drive

Video Transcript

"Hi my name is Dave Andrews, today I'm going to show you how to reset a computer's hard drive. Lets go to our computer and I'm going to show you how to run a defragment on your computer and also how to schedule a scan of the computer. We are going to run a defrag program which will basically scan through your entire hard drive on your computer and it will kind of clean up the files that are on that hard drive and put them all together. Put them where the hard drive can access them faster. To access this is Vista, lets just click on your start button and in the start search box just type in defrag and you will see the disk defragmenter appears as one of your programs. Lets click on that and in Vista you have to be an administrator to run this. Lets just click on continue. Now in this window that pops up which is the defragmentation window, I kind of have to move it around here a little bit. You can schedule it to run on a schedule which Vista actually recommends that you do. It comes on by default. It's going to run every one o'clock AM every Wednesday by default those are the settings that came with this computer. But what we want to do is actually force a defragment by clicking on the defragment now button. So lets go and click on that and this screen right here will tell you over to the side that it's currently defragging your hard drive. The next thing that we are going to do is we are going to schedule a scan for this computer. To do so just pull up a command prompt by typing cmd and that pulls up a windows command line. We are going to do what's called a check disk, chk dsk. We are going to do it on the C drive. Well actually in Vista you have to run it as an administrator so I'm going to click on my command prompt again but this time I'm going to right click and I'm going to say run as administrator. Have to continue with the permission and lets type that again. Check disk on the C drive. So right now it's running a scan of my C drive and it's going to find any problems and repair them. My name is Dave Andrews and I've just told you how to reset the files on your computer's hard drive."