help - wipe my hard drive and start over

[october]

I have a computer that is cluttered up with junk and incomplete uninstalls that have gone bad and left shadows of old programs and games on my hard drive. I would like to wipe the hard drive clean and start over like it's a brand new drive, so I can reinstall these things that the computer thinks is already there.

See what I did was uninstall some things, but the uninstall went bad and now the game is gone but it's still there in the add/remove programs list, and the computer won't let me reinstall it because it thinks it's installed. If I wipe my computer clean, it'll be like starting with it new.

How do I do it? Is it as simple as format c: and then booting up with the windows CD? Is it bad for the hard drive to do what I want to do?

 

[Jeratain]

Ahh reformatting.

First and foremost: BACKUP YOUR IMPORTANT FILES. Important files do not include movies and music, rather documents and saved games, backups of important program files such as Quickbooks profiles, etc. Save all of your important files to CD or floppy or a seperate partition on your hard drive if you have one.

Second: Make sure you have the proper discs and software to reformat your computer. You will need the following depending on the OS you plan on installing: A boot disk with a format option on it (not necessary if installing Win2k or XP or 2k3), your OS CD, drivers for hardware that you know Windows cannot detect.

Once you have completed these two steps make a plan of how you want your system to be. How big is your hard drive? Perhaps you should consider partitioning it so that you can organize the files more. If you don't know how or what partitions are, then just forget it and start formatting.

Basically you run the format program from the boot disk and wait until your disk is clean, then load the OS and go through the install steps. Or you boot your OS CD and run the format through that.

Booting from a CD may require you to edit your BIOS settings, because you would need to change the boot order. In that case you would enter your BIOS and change the boot order to CDROM, floppy, hard drive - or something on those lines.

I'm probably missing lots of info, but its 3am, and im tired. Good luck!

 

[Knight-Dragon]

Double thread... first time I've seen this.

Cont in other thread. Closed.