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Will my 2nd Hard Drive be wiped when I reformat? |
I'm using my 2nd Hard Drive to storage photos, essays and all that. My computer is in desperate need of reformatting, it have become very slow despite having 1GB RAM. I'm considering taking the cable out of my 2nd Hard Drive while I reformat and replug it in when I'm done to be on safe side since it's over 15GB in size. 10GB alone of photos! I love memories ;) The second drive will not be affected unless you change the format command to that drive. I am surprised that you want to format just because the machine is slow. There are a lot of things you can do to clean up your machine and get your speed back, without reformatting the drive. Make sure you are running a premium virus scanner, not some free-ware product. A virus or Trojan on your machine can bring it to a crawl. You should also install and run a good anti-spyware program such as Spybot Search and Destroy. This one is free to use, but they do ask that you make a donation to the organization. Follow the instructions to clean and immunize your drive from spyware. Uninstall any programs you have loaded that you never use, or no longer use. Do this through the Add/Remove function in control panel and not by just deleeting folders in the program files. Run the Disk Error Check program in system tools, and then the Defragmentor program to make sure you have no bad sectors on the drive, and to move all your free space into one block. Open the tools folder in Internet Explorer and change the days that files are stored to 0. Also go into advanced options and find a box in the Security section that says Empty temporary files when browser is closed. All these will help improve the speed of your system and you may find that reformatting in not needed. I would try all these first if for no other reason than to not have to go to the trouble of dealing with Microsoft to reactivate your copy of Windows. just unplug it and you're good to go. It would be much easier to delete stuff you dont need and do defrag a few times. It (HD) is just really crowded. There is no reason to 'reformat'. You could also buy a bigger drive and a copy of Norton Ghost and copy that drive to the new drive. Use the old one as a backup of your operating system. Disconnecting the second drive would make sure you don't format it by mistake, but it's probably not necessary. Just make sure you choose the correct drive to install Windows on when you do the reinstall. when you format you do so by drive letter. You can leave the second plugged in, in doesn't matter. Just to help you, formatting does nothing to help your pc. It's something that novice uses use to fix problems they don't know how to fix. I suggest you do a drive cleaning and defrag, this is a much better use of your time. Your hard drive is external, correct? If so, it is not considered a parition, since Windows Xp is not installed on it. The safe thing to do would be to unplug the external hardrive from your machine (it is required to unplug all external devices [except for a mouse and a keyboard] during reformatting) Your external hard drive will be safe from reformation, so don't worry, just unplug it. |
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