reformatting a p.c

whilst riding a camel...

I got some bad strains of porn on my computer (due to my friend being a naive dumbfuck). Well, I've heard thing about reformatting a p.c and I personally wouldnt have a flying fuck of an idea as to how it's done.


Educate me please.

Peter Principle

On modern personal computers, information that is permanently stored on your computer is typically stored on a hard drive. This is also almost always where your operating system is. A brand new hard drive must be formatted to tell the computer how to store data on it. If you reformat a drive that already has information on it, all the information on it will be completely erased. You then have a blank slate on which to reinstall the operating system. (There can be a bit more to it, but that's the general overview.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disk_format

http://www.helpdesk.umd.edu/topics/troubleshooting/os/windows_2000/4349/

Aurin

If you do decide to format, make sure that you have any and all discs that you can possibly find. Drivers, operating system, even games you may have installed. Insure you back up any information you want to keep.

MotherFirefly

If you're running off of Windows XP this is a pretty good walkthrough

http://helpdesk.its.uiowa.edu/windows/instructions/reformat.htm
Things you need:
-Make sure to back up any information that you still want (probably not your porn) on an external harddrive or something similar, there are also several online sites that let you "dump" up to 1GB of stuff. It's good if all you want to keep is mostly pictures, documents, and some music.
-Make sure you still have your Windows XP key that you initially downloaded it with, you're going to want that, or else you might have to buy it again
-Make sure you have a copy of your MSoffice disk etc, that's going to be erased too.

Daedalus

Also, if we're talking about some really bad stuff, the kind of stuff the 4chan Party Van would take an interest in, you're going to need to do more than a simple reformat. Download Darik's Boot and Nuke. It will overwrite the entire hard drive a number of times with random data, to ensure that nothing can be recovered ever.

Important note: this means that nothing can be recovered ever, so back up any important shit first.

GrimReaper

Ditto on what others have said.

* Backup any and all data to something like a usb memory stick. (docs, files etc)
* Download and write the latest drivers for your motherboard, lan etc to a cd to be installed once the OS has been installed.

Then.

* Insert the windows cd into the drive and reboot the machine.
- If windows boots from the hard drive you need to go into the bios and set the boot priority of the cd drive higher
* Once the cd boots up make sure to delete any and all existing partitions (since you're wanting to wipe the machine)
* Create a new partition and format it with NTFS (this may take a while)
* Install windows
* When windows is installed, install the drivers from the cd you wrote
* Go to http://windowsupdate.microsoft.com and install the updates from there
* Install all your favourite programs etc

I'll post an example movie when I get the time

Peter Principle

Some other things that are easy to forget when you wipe a hard drive: your favorites list from your web browser, your inbox & outbox from your email program (if you use something like Outlook), archives of conversations if you use yahoo IM, save games from Civ III (d'oh!).