PC Disaster and Recovery

There are many good reasons to format your hard drive and reinstall your operating system, your applications, and all those files you’ve stored elsewhere. Yet starting fresh isn’t a magic bullet. There are many problems it won’t cure, including

• Problematic or failing hardware (A formatting won’t fix a dying hard drive or an overheated CPU.)

• Situations that arise when you reinstall an application or utility that isn’t compatible with your version of Windows, your file system (the FAT), or some other component on your system

The Right Situations for Starting from Scratch

There are many good reasons for starting your system with a refreshed hard drive, operating system, and file system:

• You’ve had numerous problems with your PC and have already systematically ruled out

  • outdated drivers or the wrong type of driver

  • too little memory or the wrong type of memory

  • insufficient disk space

  • hardware conflicts

  • overheating or power instability

  • Windows instability

• You obtain a used PC and want to rid yourself and the PC of the previous owner’s junk.

• You have an older system on which your original hard drive has not been reformatted since you first got the PC three or more years ago. This is especially true of older systems, where many operating system and application upgrades have been installed.

• You have a large hard drive that you want to partition to better organize your system and to reduce the amount of time it takes to perform maintenance on a large physical drive. (Partitioning a hard drive divides it into two or more logical drives.)

• You’ve watched system performance deteriorate over a period of time and the improvements you experience following disk maintenance seem to be less and less dramatic.

• You can no longer use troubleshooting modes such as Safe Mode and Windows XP Recovery Console to successfully load Windows.

• Using the System Restore feature fails to apply a decent working restore point.

• You’re a serious download- or install-aholic (or beta tester) and you install and remove programs frequently. You may find it beneficial to reformat the hard drive and start fresh after six months to a year of such practices. This will remove all the extra files and Registry entries that the uninstall utilities for those defunct programs didn’t take with them.

• You’ve experienced file corruption after a virus. Check your drive partition(s) and reformat the affected hard drive if necessary. (The section “Starting Fresh but Stopping Between Steps” discusses this in detail.)

  Note

  Someone asked me the other day if he needed to replace his hard drive because it had been infected with a confirmed virus. This made me realize I’ve heard that question many times before. It made me wonder if there’s a misconception about viruses. A computer virus isn’t like a human virus that sometimes leaves its imprint on your genetic code; so long as the PC virus has been properly removed, there is no need to replace the hard drive. Thankfully, viruses that actually damage physical hardware are still seen more in users’ overactive imaginations than in day-to-day reality.

The Wrong Situations for Starting from Scratch

Sadly, there are plenty of erroneous reasons to wipe your hard drive clean and start fresh. Many of them boil down to bad or lazy advice. This kind of advice is offered too quickly when you ask how to fix a problem, and the person, rather than considering a long, detailed process, shoots back with, “Why not format and start all over again?” After all, formatting won’t fix a noisy drive or one with persistent errors. It won’t cure basic incompatibilities between your PC configuration and your version of Windows, and it won’t do a thing to combat overheating, power issues, or operating the PC in a less-than-ideal working environment.

Don’t format and start over if

• Your problems are limited to one application or only occur when one program is running. Instead, try to remove (by uninstalling under Add or Remove Programs in Control Panel) the program first to see if this resolves the instability.

• You haven’t yet done disk maintenance to improve your PC’s performance.

• You haven’t tried other measures, including those described in Chapter 9, “Stabilizing Your Operating System,” to try to resolve your problems.

• A piece of hardware won’t work. Getting the right device driver might work, but reinstalling the operating system probably won’t.

• You’re in a panic and don’t know what else to do.

• You don’t have what you need to reinstall your system. (See the section “What You Need to Start Fresh” later in this chapter.)

You’ve no doubt heard of or experienced buyer’s remorse. It feels terrible, but you know you can return the item you bought if the remorse gets too acute.

Formatter’s remorse is much worse because you can’t get back the data you lose by formatting (or normal repartitioning that requires a format), at least not without extreme and often expensive measures such as hiring a data recovery specialist.

Remember how I told you in the last chapter to pick your assistance carefully? In my experience, far too many people suggest you format and start fresh for situations that a) don’t require it and b) won’t be resolved by it. Such people mean well, but they may be too technically incompetent to even remind you to back up your files before you format.

During my years helping folks with PC problems, many people came to me each week because they panicked and reformatted (or used those recovery disks that come with new PCs), only to discover later that everything they had created, downloaded, or otherwise saved to their hard drive was lost.

I’ve heard tragic tales about critical financial or legal papers, one-of-a-kind digital photographs, master’s and doctoral degree theses, medical patient records, critical tax records, original plays and novels, and many other precious files disappearing in a moment of blind panic.

If you have software, settings, and files that exist only on your hard drive that you cannot lose, don’t reformat or repartition without backing up those files.

Never format in a panic and don’t take—or give—a recommendation to format lightly because it won’t be a question of if you’ll lose the files stored on your hard drive; you will.