Do I Need to Format My Hard Drive When Doing a Fresh Install of Windows?
By Timothy Tibbetts |
When dealing with the dreaded fresh install of Windows people often wonder if they need to format their drives. The short answer is no and here's why.
When you install Windows, all you need to do is select the drive and Windows will partition off the space it needs for system files as Windows itself. To be honest, partitioning and formatting a hard drive nowadays is required only if you want to partition off space for storage. Mostly.
We're old school, and we prefer to select all partitions on our primary (C) drive and delete them all, then allow Windows to create whatever partitions are needed before installing Windows. It's just simple to do.
We also like to do this for security reasons. By deleting all of the partitions, then letting windows recreate what's needed, there's a better chance of overwriting free space on our drive making data unrecoverable. Of course, you can always write zeros to the drive with numerous freeware programs as well, but we don't have the nuclear launch codes on our computer, so we've been happy going this route for many years.
Before you reinstall Windows, you could uninstall some of your programs and use CCleaner to both clean your drive and wipe free space adding an additional layer of security.
We cover how to secure delete with CCleaner at 5:31 in this video:
We should note this applies to any hard drive, including SSD.
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When you install Windows, all you need to do is select the drive and Windows will partition off the space it needs for system files as Windows itself. To be honest, partitioning and formatting a hard drive nowadays is required only if you want to partition off space for storage. Mostly.
We're old school, and we prefer to select all partitions on our primary (C) drive and delete them all, then allow Windows to create whatever partitions are needed before installing Windows. It's just simple to do.
We also like to do this for security reasons. By deleting all of the partitions, then letting windows recreate what's needed, there's a better chance of overwriting free space on our drive making data unrecoverable. Of course, you can always write zeros to the drive with numerous freeware programs as well, but we don't have the nuclear launch codes on our computer, so we've been happy going this route for many years.
Before you reinstall Windows, you could uninstall some of your programs and use CCleaner to both clean your drive and wipe free space adding an additional layer of security.
We cover how to secure delete with CCleaner at 5:31 in this video:
We should note this applies to any hard drive, including SSD.
Similar:
