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What happens if you format a hard drive?

Luigi Oppido
Computer & Tech Specialist
Luigi Oppido is the Owner and Operator of Pleasure Point Computers in Santa Cruz, California. Luigi has over 25 years of experience in general computer repair, data recovery, virus removal, and upgrades. He is also the host of the Computer Man Show! broadcasted on KSQD covering central California for over two years.

Luigi Oppido

Computer & Tech Specialist

Expert Answer

It erases the information on the disk. However, it doesn't necessarily mean that all of that information is permanently gone. There are some complex ways it could be recovered.

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How do I completely format a hard drive?

Luigi Oppido
Computer & Tech Specialist
Luigi Oppido is the Owner and Operator of Pleasure Point Computers in Santa Cruz, California. Luigi has over 25 years of experience in general computer repair, data recovery, virus removal, and upgrades. He is also the host of the Computer Man Show! broadcasted on KSQD covering central California for over two years.

Luigi Oppido

Computer & Tech Specialist

Expert Answer

The only real way to totally erase all of the information is to literally rewrite the underlying binary code on the drive. You have to use a special program or service to pull this off, though. Most computers don't have the ability to do this. I'm a fan of Darren's Boot Nuke D Ban, which is a free bit of software that will do this.

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Question

Does formatting a drive remove Windows?

Luigi Oppido
Computer & Tech Specialist
Luigi Oppido is the Owner and Operator of Pleasure Point Computers in Santa Cruz, California. Luigi has over 25 years of experience in general computer repair, data recovery, virus removal, and upgrades. He is also the host of the Computer Man Show! broadcasted on KSQD covering central California for over two years.

Luigi Oppido

Computer & Tech Specialist

Expert Answer

It depends on whether you format the entire drive or not. If you format everything, you're going to need to reinstall Windows.

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What does it mean when I see: "Windows cannot format the system partition on this disk"?

Community Answer

You'll have to manually clean out the hard drive. The system cannot format it because the computer is using an old hard drive, or a hard drive which is not wholly compatible with Windows 10.

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Can I start using a hard disk for data storage after formatting it?

Community Answer

Yes, you can. If you are using Windows, format it to the NTFS file system with a block size of 4096 bytes. Those are the standard settings when right-clicking on a drive and then choosing "Format," so there should be no need to change anything. Make sure you use "Quick Format" (there is a checkbox at the bottom of the format menu), or it will take forever. Once your drive is formatted (which should not take longer than a minute or two), it is ready to receive files.

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