Formatting your computer hard drive is like cleaning a slate, and readying it to be written-on again. A hard drive is comprised of partitions like the D partition, the C partition etc. Formatting checks all these partitions, and gets them uninfected.

Even when computers are incessantly crashing, it creates a hard drive formatting situation. Clearing your hard drive is easy. Most computer operating systems come with their own set of hard drive formatting tools.

For Windows XP users, Right-click on My Computer icon on your desktop, and select Manage option. In the ensuing window, click Disc Management. You will now see the contents of the Disk Management window. Before you start off the cleaning process, you got to delete the logical drive first. Logical drive is the partition of your computer hard drive. To do that, right click on the required partition, and select Delete Logical Drive. The required partition might be in any of the Disks that you see in the Computer Management window. It’s the way your hard drive is setup. Remember you ought to backup all data before doing this. That’s because once you have deleted it, the data’s gone!

If you want to format lots of partitions at one time, make sure you backup data from these partitions, and do the Delete Logical Drive action. Once deleted, the box will be empty, and will have a prompt at the top telling you that it is free-spaced and waiting to be formatted. Right click on this ppromt and select New Partition option. In the ensuing wizard click Next button. On the next screen, select Primary Partition followed by clicking Next button again. After this, select the drive that you want this partition to get into from a drop-down menu. Following which, you will get a dialog box. In the dialog box, you can set the volume of this partition in Volume Label field. Always choose File System as NTFS, and set the Allocation Unit Size field as default. Since the drive is new, select Perform a quick format, and click Next. Click Finish in the last screen.