Things to Do Before Reformatting Your Hard Drive

Every once in a while, Windows grumbles about aches and pains that you think are just trivial. Crashes occur a few times in a month, and the blue screen of death makes its appearance once in a while.

While these symptoms may not alarm you, especially if your system is guarded by the best security and utility suites that a wad of Benjamin Franklin notes has to offer, you may want to take some insurance measures just in case. Serious PC problems often manifest themselves with mundane coughs and hiccups. By the time you seriously pay attention to the problem though, it might already be too late as the data corruption has already metastasized.

In serious situations, such as when you can’t even boot from your hard drive anymore, many would often suggest that you take the very drastic measure of reformatting your primary storage device and start out clean again. While I do sometimes suggest this solution, I usually give a checklist on what you should have in hand before you mop everything out of your hard drive. Here are some of the things that you should have or should do first before reformatting your disk:

1.  Look for your restore disc or OS disc.

This is the first thing that you got to have if your PC refuses to boot. You won’t be able to access your hard drive and its contents without first booting the life out of your PC. If you can’t remember whether one was given to you, try to check your computer’s box and see if it’s still there. If you’ve lost it, then a call to your PC manufacturer’s hotline for a copy thereof won’t hurt. Once you have it, try to resuscitate your computer by restoring all your system’s settings back to what it was when you pulled it out of the box.

2.  Backup.

Once you’ve pumped life back to your OS again, immediately make a backup of all important files that you’ve stored in your hard drive. There’s a possibility that your system might experience problems again, so it’s best that you clone your hard drive so that you won’t be pulling your hair off your head if the next system crash turns out to be “the one.” You might want to invest in an external hard drive for this purpose.

3.  Look for your applications’ installation discs.

Having a backup copy of all the important data in your hard drive may make you brazen enough to contemplate on immediately reformatting your hard drive rather than sticking with your revived and patched-up OS for a few months more. Before you abandon other alternative solutions to your computer’s occasional crashes, make sure that you have all the installation discs of the programs that you have on your PC. You may have made a backup of all the word documents and spreadsheet files that you need, but they’ll be practically useless if you don’t have the office suite that could open them.