formatting my HD

[Easdown]

gonna format my hard drive, just wanna know how to do it, what i need to install windows and drivers and stuff, thx

 

[Shovel]

gonna format my hard drive, just wanna know how to do it, what i need to install windows and drivers and stuff, thx

1. Windows CD. All of them after Windows 98 are bootable so you wont need a boot disk. You'll have to make sure that the first boot device in your BIOS is set to CD-ROM. Reboot with the CD in and you should find it'll start setup automatically.
   
   If it's Windows 2000/XP you should find there's the option of reformatting your drive from within the installer, just follow the instructions.
2. Drivers etc. are really dependent on the age of the OS. I run XP, which is very good at automatically configuring network/internet connections and even sound and graphics from the first boot. That's not to say they'll be the best drivers for your hardware - but it will work. 2000 I don't know about I'm afraid, since I never ran that myself. 98 is a bit a of a dog and you'll need to prepare a CD with the latest drivers from your various hardware suppliers (as advised below anyway).
   
   The drivers you'll need specifically are of the Graphics card, sound card, printer, mouse, keyboard variety. When reinstalling it's good practice to download the latest drivers from the manufacturers websites and install the latest drivers immediately. Safety says that downloading these first and burning them to CD 'just in case' the network connection doesn't configure is a good idea.
3. Back up everything you want to keep!
   • Documents
   • Emails (Export them from your mail client of choice)
   • Savegames
   • Etc.
4. Make sure that you have the installation disks for your software. You might be suprised at how many file types you can't open when you first boot up.
5. As soon as you've installed, install and update Anti-Virus and get a firewall set up. Then immediately run Windows Update (htpp://windowsupdate.microsoft.com).

The actual process of installing Windows is fairly easy. There're good descriptions of what're you're supposed to do at each stage, and after a while it just takes off and does the rest by itself. The newer the version of Windows, the faster and less interaction required.

If you are feeling a little more ambitious then it might be a good idea to partition your hard disk - if you've not done so already. It can take some of the stress out of future reinstallations. Essentially you chop your disk up into 2 or more sections - 10 - 15GB for Windows, and then everything else for Software/Documents. I shan't go into more detail, since there are other's here who can explain the process better - and on top of that I think it's been covered recently in a previous thread.

Hope that helps though. If I've missed anything, someone please come in screaming before he does it...

 

[babs]

Think that's just about all of it covered, a couple of things I always forget to backup during a reinstallation though....

Bookmarks - I always end up losing some obscure site for good.
Email addresses
MSN/ICQ/Trillian logs and contact lists (I know that some services do it remotely now but still)

 

[Clown]

Aren't the MSN contact lists stored online?

 

[old.user4556]

Aren't the MSN contact lists stored online?

Yes

 

[SilverHood]

Make sure you have your rare drivers saved too!

I re formatted once, I couldn't get my sound drivers online.... no sound until I found the disk several months later.

 

[Diezel]

Make sure you have your rare drivers saved too!

I re formatted once, I couldn't get my sound drivers online.... no sound until I found the disk several months later.

lol, why not pop by ur local pc shop and ask em to burn the drivers for you real quick? When I bought my pc it had powerDvD on it but didn't have it on disc so after format i just went back and asked for it. wasn't a problem.