Q: My husband formatted the hard drive on our desktop and now it won’t find the Ethernet card. The drivers are on the CD and it wont accept them. I don’t have Internet access from that computer but do have access from another. What do I do?
Q: Can I format my hard drive without loosing my operating system and data?
A: Some people truly don’t understand what it means to format a hard drive so I would like to take this opportunity to make sure we cover all the bases when it comes to formatting a hard drive.
Some reasons people might format a hard drive would be because their computer was hacked, had spyware installed, or had a bad virus. Formatting your hard drive in these cases allows you to erase everything. It is almost like throwing your computer away and buying a new one. If you went to the store and bought a new computer you would not have any of your pictures, documents, or anything else that you might have created on it anymore. Read the rest of this entry »
Read Question HereQ: How do I reformat my Dell computer?
Read Answer HereQ: I need to reformat my computer and make it fresh and new. My computer is gateway 832GM. How do I reformat it?
Q: Can I format my hard drive without loosing Windows XP?
Read Answer HereQ: How can I erase a hard drive that came with another desktop so that I can now use it in my computer for storage only? The hard drive in question has Windows installed on it but I now want to move it into the my computer and use it just for storage.
A: There are a few ways you can do this and both of them require that you install the hard drive in the computer. To do this is a little outside of this answer but you will have to open up your computer and make sure that your new drive, if it has jumpers, has the jumpers set correctly for how you are connecting it.
Once the hard drive is connected you will have access to everything on the hard drive. The first way of deleting the data is no different than how you would delete data on your existing hard drive. To do this you can go to My Computer and you can either get there by going to Start -> My Computer or if you have an older version of Windows then My Computer should be right on your desktop.
From here you will want to look for the heading that says Hard Disk Drives and you should see a Local Disk (C:) and a Local Disk (D:). You want to make sure NOT to touch C:. You will want to right click on Local Disk (D:) and select Format… and you probably want to make sure that the Quick Format option is checked off, as it will run much faster and it will do the job for what you are doing.
