How to Reformat a Crashed Computer?
If your computer gets crashed and you are not able to bring it back to life, the next step is to reformat it. Reformatting a computer has many benefits: It frees up the space, removes flies containing virus and spyware harming your computer, and clean your hard drive. The quickest way to do reformatting is to recover files in the hard drive by using another computer.
After you remove the hard disk of a crashed computer, install it as a slave drive on another working computer. You must know type of cable system used to connect devices to motherboard before installing the slave drive. IDE and SATA are two types of systems used in this purpose. IDE drives have flat and 4 inch wide cables, while SATA drives have thin cables.
If you have an IDE drive, you should set the jumpers to “slave” after referring to the manual of your drive. Setting a jumper is easy and there is a manual that illustrates on how to set the jumpers. If your drive is SATA, then you don’t be worried about setting the jumper.
Most of the motherboard are able to accommodate two IDE cables. It is easier to have two drives (master and slave) in a single cable. You can easily know in which place of the drive, you will insert the slave drive. Master drive is connected to the connector at the end of cable and the slave drive is connected to the connector at the middle of the cable. There are only two connectors, so you won’t find any problem in locating both slave and master drive.
After this, your next step will to plug in the drive’s power connector into any available socket that will connect to the power supply. Start the computer after this.
See if the icon appears in the my computer folder, so that the drive can be opened. If the drive can be opened, then there won’t be any problem in recovering the stored data. If you can not open the drive, then use a data recovery software to retrieve the data in the disk. After you receive the data from the crashed drive, you can easily reformat it.
The process is same for Windows XP and Vista. After the installation of slave drive is done, the icon will automatically appear in the my computer folder. To reformat the slave drive, you just just have to reformat its icon and select format option.
After this, a format box appears and you can choose between NTFS or FAT32 format. NTFS format is default, so leave it that. However, NTFS format is better than FAT32, because it is standard file system of Windows NT, including later versions Windows 2000, XP, Server 2003, 2008 and Vista. Do not go for quick format as it is always better to have a normal format because it gives a cleaner drive afterward and all the virus that caused crash would be totally erased.
After reformatting the drive, remove and reinstall it in your computer.