Should I Delete the Partition or Just Format the Drive
Some technicians suggest only formatting the drive and not to delete the partition. They feel the format does just as good. In my opinion that you should delete the partition as well. Depending on the issue that your having, just formatting the drive may not fix the issue. I have seen situations where the issue remains after just a format but is fixed when the partition is blown away and recreated.
To explain the layout of the partition and format, here is a description most people understand. When you are going to build a house, you first create a blueprint of the house. This shows you how the house is going to look and the dimensions. The blueprint is the partition. After you create the blueprint (partition), you build the foundation. The foundation is the format of the hard drive. Once the foundation (format) is done, everything else is added on top of it such as the walls, roof and so forth. On a computer this part would be windows, drivers and programs.
The time frame to delete and recreate the partition takes less than 5 minutes. There is different methods to delete and recreate the partition.
- Boot to DOS and use the FDISK utility to delete the partition, and then use FDISK to recreate the partition
- Boot to DOS and use the Delpart.exe utility to delete the partition and use FDISK to recreate the partition.
- Boot to the Windows CD. Then delete the partition and recreate it during the windows setup procedure.
Use caution on deleting a partition
- Computer manufactures put diagnostics and other utilities in a separate partition than the main partition. When you go to delete the partitions, make sure you delete the correct partition. If you delete the partition with the utilities, you won't have access to the utilities.
- Once the utility partition is gone, some manufactures don't provide a way to replace them.
Word on formatting the drive. There is two methods of formatting. Some believe there is no difference in the quick and the full. I haven't seen any difference in either method so the quick may be fine to use but considering the amount of time it takes to do a complete reinstall, I prefer to do the full format. This way I know it is complete. If for some reason the quick doesn't work, you will have to start all over. Below is the estimated time frame of each step of a reinstall and you will see why it is better to do the full.
The times are estimate times but the order of the install is accurate.
| Step | Timeframe | |
| Delete partition | - | Under 4 minutes |
| Recreate partition | - | Under 4 minutes |
| Quick format | - | Ten minutes or less |
| Full Format | - | Twenty minutes to an hour (depending on size of drive) |
| Install Operating System | - | 30 minutes to an hour |
| Driver install | - | 15 minutes to an hour (usually around 15) |
| Programs | - | 30 minutes to two hours depending on the number of programs |
| Tweaking | - | varies |