BM08

Am i right in thinking that if you re-format a computer it deletes absolutly everything except windows?

What i wanna do is delete everything on my computer except windows, is that possible?

I went onto my computer icon then right click C: then format but it said "windows was unable to complete the format"?

What am i doing wrong? im not a computer retard, i just havent had to do this before.

Phil

iTrader: (1)

Reformat will make you lose everything INCLUDING Windows!

Your best bet is to go into Control Panel, Add/Remove Programs and uninstall everything, then go round deleting anything alse manually.

Either that or Reformat and re-install Windows.

adamS2RST

No.

Yes.

You cannot format your computer within a booted windows environment. What operating system areyou runing, i.e win2k, win xp? You should have the recovery cds that came with the computer.

Try the above, if you have the cd's its easy to do. But be careful

Thrush

iTrader: (1)

As said, if you have the proper windows OS disc (ie XP, 2000, etc) the easiest way is to boot up from the disc and run a format, which will completely delete everything off your hard drive, and then install a fresh new version of Windows on your PC. You will end up with a completely blank PC, but with a nice new version of Windows OS.

You do need to be carefull tho, my mate decided to do this yesterday morning, and then rang me up cos he had no sound, the screen display was all wrong and he couldn't change the resolution, and it was booting up all funny.

What happens when you format the C drive and re-install windows is you lose all your drivers - so you have no software for your graphics card or soundcard, or anything really.

What he had done was lose these drivers, then for some reason, fooked up and made two partitions in his hard drive both of which had a windows OS installed on it, making everything work very funily, and not work properly.

So I wiped it all again, reformatted, installed XP after deleting all partitions, then had to go about finding, downloading and installing sound, graphics and activeX drivers (fortunately his machine is a Dell, so al that stuff was available from thier site)

When I reformatted my win98 machine I had to do all the above, but cos my machine is shitty and old, getting drivers was a pain in the ass. I have it sorted now, but won't be reformatting it again any time soon!!!!!!

DanRSturbo

If you use your recovery disk's then you will lose everything, and it will put the pc back to how you bought it (depending on what it is). This will however load all your drivers, if you use a Windows OEM cd, then you could have driver issues and things not working properly.

The only other way, would be to uninstall all your applications, then alos manually delete the program folders from the c: drive.