How Do I Reformat My Crashed Computer?

If your computer has crashed and you could not bring it back to life, the obvious next step is to do a reformat. Reformatting has many benefits; first, it frees up space, second, it removes files like virus and spyware that otherwise could not be removed without formatting, third, it wipes clean your hard drive. But before doing the reformat you have to retrieve the important data in the crashed computer's hard drive. The quickest way to do this is recovering the files in the hard drive using another computer.

Remove the hard disk of crashed computer and install it as a slave drive to a working computer. To install it as a slave drive to another computer, you must know type of cable system that is used to connect drives to the motherboard. There two systems that are commonly used, the IDE and the SATA. IDE drives have wide, flat cables around 4 inches wide whereas SATA drives have thin cables (usually red in color) about the diameter of a pen. If what you have is an IDE drive, set the jumpers to "slave". Refer to your drive's manual for this. Setting the jumper is very easy; the manual usually has an illustration showing how to set the jumpers. If your drive is SATA there's no need to worry about setting the jumper.

Most motherboards can accommodate two IDE cables. But it would be easier to have the two drives (master and slave) in one cable. It is easy to know where in the IDE cable's two connectors you will insert the slave drive. The master drive is connected to the connector at the end of the cable; the slave drive must be connected to the connector in the middle of the cable. There are only to connectors in the cable so you won't have a hard time locating them.

The next step is to plug in the drive's power connector to any one of the available sockets that connects to the power supply. Start the computer.

See if the drive can be opened in that computer or if its icon appears at all in the My Computer folder. If it can be opened then there is no problem recovering the data stored in there. If the drive cannot be opened, you can use a data recovery software like Recover My Files to retrieve the data in the disk. After retrieving the data from the crashed drive, you can then reformat it. The process to be followed is more or less there same for Windows XP and Windows Vista; after you successfully installed the slave drive its icon will automatically be visible in the My Computer folder. To reformat the slave drive, just right-click its icon in the "My Computer" folder and select "Format". The Format box will pop up and there you can choose between NTFS or FAT32 format. The default is NTFS so leave it at that. NTFS is better than FAT32 anyway; it is the standard file system of Windows NT, including its later versions Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2008, and Windows Vista. Do not check the "Quick Format" because it is good to have a normal format because it will give you a cleaner drive afterward and all virus or malware that could have caused the crash would be totally erased. After you click the Format the drive will be formatted.

After reformatting the drive remove it and reinstall it in your computer. You can then do a clean install of your Windows operating system.