How to Reformat a Hard Drive

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Chris Bryce from superservice.com. Let's go over how to reformat a hard drive. There's a couple different ways to do this but the easiest ways are to open either "My Computer" or Windows Explorer and find the drive that you're going to format. It will be listed in the list of available hard drives. If you go to the hard drive, which in this instance we're going to use deco 1, we'll right click on the hard drive, go down and select format from the menu that's available. And then it will walk you through from there in a wizard format, how to format the drive completely. There's a quick format which will allow you to quickly erase all the files and should only take a few short minutes. There's also a full format which will completely and orderly format the drive and erase all data from the drive. This normally takes thirty minutes to an hour, even sometimes two hours, depending on the size of your drive, if you have a larger, like 500 gigabyte hard drive. Once the format is complete, it will tell you that the drive has been formatted and it will allow you to either rename the drive or keep the name that you've got associated with it. The other way to reformat a hard drive is, if you're going to be adding a new operating system to it. You'll take that operating system install CD and put it in the drive and boot the computer using that CD or DVD. That will allow you to have the installation options such as, formatting or reformatting the hard disk. Those are the options that you have available most of the time, for reformatting your hard disk."