If your Widows XP based computer is running slow, crashing a lot or has pop-ups that you can’t get rid of, you may need to reformat your hard drive as a last resort. Here are the steps that you should take before reformatting.
Things you need
You will need to make sure that you have the CD’s that came with your computer, or new ones, including the boot disk. This is essential to bringing your computer back up and restoring Windows. Without the boot disks, your computer will not be functional. You will want to have a removable hard drive to copy your important and uninfected or uncorrupted files to. You should have a good spyware and a good anti-virus program too.
Determine what is wrong with your computer
There are different steps to take depending on what is wrong with the computer. If your computer keeps going to the blue screen of death or generating system errors, look online to determine what causes the errors. You may be able to perform a system restore to fix critical errors in Windows based systems. If you have a slow running system or pop-ups that won’t go away, do a search on the types of pop-ups you are getting and run a full system scan with both a spyware program and an antivirus program.
Reformatting
If you have run the system scans, done a system restore and followed all potential avenues to get rid of the corrupt or infected files, then you may decide to reformat the hard driver in order to start over. First you will want to copy your essential files, such as documents, music files and photos, to the removable hard drive. Be sure to scan all files before putting them on the hard drive. Once you have all files copied, you can go in to your Windows Explorer program and open the option called My Computer. Right click on the Local Disk. There will be an option in the menu for formatting. The quick format selection should do the trick for most problems. Once you have selected that, the computer will do the work. Once the reformatting is complete, you will need to insert the boot disk for your operating system.
Reformatting before donation or sale
If you are reformatting for removal of information, you will need to make sure that your have overwritten the hard drive at least once. There are programs available that will put blank data over the reformatted hard drive to ensure that no one can access any of the data you had on the hard drive. If you are very concerned about your data, you can always remove and replace the hard drive completely, but generally, overwriting the drive will work.