Formatting a hard drive is a moderately hard task to do and for good reason, when you format a hard drive in windows or any operating system you lose everything on the hard-drive. This means that all your documents and programs are erased. This means that before you format your hard drive you should copy any documents that you want to keep onto a backup CD or flash drive, you should also make sure that you have a copy of all the programs and their activation codes so that you can reinstall them afterwards.

To format a hard drive with Windows XP, which is the most common Windows operating system today. You have to go to my computer and click on manage. A window called computer management should come up from that window you click on storage then select disk management. In the window that comes up you should see all your partitions (parts of your hard drive) lined up. If there are multiple partitions on the hard drive this is where you must decide if you want to format all the partitions or one of them.

If you want to format the whole drive, you should delete the other partitions on the drive, thus putting the whole drive under one name (C:/). Then left-click on the drive/partition name and click format. You just learned how to format your hard-drive in Windows XP.

If you use any other Windows system (eg. vista, 2000, 98) the process is the same or almost the same since vista allows you to format a hard drive right from the my computer window. That being said you can still find the disk management program in the control panel. You can also format windows using the command prompt, since all Windows systems have a command prompt window.

If you wish to format a hard drive from the command prompt and install a new system, you need to insert the start up cd and start the computer, Bring up the command prompt and type `format c:` without quotes into the prompt window then press enter. A warning will come up saying `all data on nonremovable disk drive c: will be lost` `proceed with format (Y/N) You should press Y then enter to continue with the Formatting.

Remember, that Formatting doesn`t wipe the disk and as such Formatting a disk will only get rid of the data on an exterior level not on the interior. Think of Formatting putting a layer of primer on a wall, putting the primer down gives you a clean slate but it doesn`t get rid of the paint or wallpaper underneath. Still for a common everyday computer user Formatting a drive is all that`s required.