In fact, if you are disposing of the drive or passing it on to someone else it's worth securely erasing the contents to make sure no personal information can be recovered. It's just a fast way of wiping the drive which is fine if you're going to reuse it yourself, but not if you're disposing of the disk or giving it to someone else.
Beware of 'Quick Format' which leaves all your data in place and makes the drive appear to be empty.
But there are a different types of formatting. When you format a drive, it frees up space for new files. In order to do this you will need to boot your PC from a Windows installation disc, a USB flash drive or another bootable drive. You can't, for example, format the hard drive on which Windows is running.
Note that the process can be different depending on whether it's your only hard drive and whether you have a spare PC or not. We explain how to use tools built in to Windows to completely wipe a PC or laptop drive. The particular drive letter assigned will depend on your machine’s configuration.Formatting a computer's hard drive is an important step if you're disposing of it and wish to remove all your personal data, and also if you want to completely remove an old Windows installation. The BIOS should now automatically detect the new drive.When Windows has loaded you can confirm that it has by going to My Computer where you should see the new drive identified. Save the settings and exit the setup routine, allowing the system to continue to boot. Make sure this is not enabled, else a drive connected to the floppy cable after the twist may not be recognised as your A: drive. Some BIOSes have a feature that renders a drive’s location in relation to the ribbon twist irrelevant. If a Master or Slave device is set to Disable or None or a similar designation, change it as appropriate to Enable or Auto (or something similar, depending on your setup program). To have the BIOS automatically detect the new drive and set its parameters you need to enter the Standard CMOS Setup category of the BIOS Setup and ensure that the IDE Master and Slave designations are correct for your current configuration.
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