how to format my hard drive and reinstall windows vista

When and why do I need to format hard drive/drives? Windows 7 & Vista Format Hard Drive and Partition FAQ We hope you enjoy our format hard drive guide! Click here if you want to learn how to shrink a hard drive volume. The shrink volume feature works fairly well in Vista, but in Windows 7 it actually works even better. With Windows 7 and Vista however, both operating systems actually have a very handy shrink volume feature integrated right into them. In pre Windows Vista and Windows 7 operating systems such as Windows XP or 2000, shrinking a volume had to be performed via 3rd party tools that typically required purchasing such as Partition Magic. In the event that your hard drive is already formatted to capacity and you do not have unallocated space available, what you can do in these situations is shrink an existing volume to make space for a new partition. Note: You cannot format a disk partition that contains the Windows operating system.

There are actually only a few basic requirements that must be met before you can create and format hard drive partitions.įirst you must be logged into the computer under an account with administrator privileges, and secondly the hard disk simply needs to have unallocated/free disk space.

To familiarize yourself with formatting and partitioning we first provide answers to common hard drive partitioning and formatting questions in our frequently asked questions section, and then we show you step by step how to partition and format a hard drive in Windows 7 and Vista. How To Create and Format Hard Drive Partition: OverviewĬreating and formatting a hard disk partition in Windows 7, Vista, and previous Windows operating systems is actually a pretty straight forward process.

How to format my hard drive and reinstall windows vista