Reformatting a HD may seem daunting, especially if you have never done it before.  It is recommended that you reformat your computer's hard drive twice a year, once every six months.  Reformatting a HD helps eliminate unnecessary files, folders, processes and restores your operating system back to its start.  This helps speed up boot time, speed up processes and gives you the opportunity to have a fresh start with your computer.

There are two primary, easy ways to reformat a hard drive. You can either do it via system restore disks or you can do it via a recovery partition. System restore discs used to come with a new computer purchase. They were burned ahead of time by the manufacturer and included in the box. However, new computers no longer come with system restore discs and you either have to make them yourself once you boot up your system or you have to purchase them separately. Some computer retailers, such as Best Buy, offer to make restore discs for you at the time or purchase for additional labor costs.

With restore discs, you basically pop them into your DVD or CD-Rom drive, reboot your system and the computer realizes you have a disc in the drive. It then attempts to boot from disc, and it will walk you through the process of reformatting your hard drive. Before you do this, you want to ensure you have backed up any data you wanted to save otherwise it will be overwritten and lost during the overall process. Whenever attempting any sort of reformatting process, always backup your data to a portable HD, DVDs or other media before starting.

Some newer computers come with what is called a recovery partition. This allows you to do a system restore and reformat by booting the secondary partition on your hard drive. A partition basically divides your hard drive into two separate hard drives within the same unit. This lets you install certain things in one place, access files in another or in the case of a recovery partition, it allows you to save the most important data without actually backing it up to another device. While using a recovery partition is not foolproof, it does make things easier if you have to do a reformat on the fly and do not have time to backup files, folders and other data.

If you have to reformat your hard drive, you do not have to worry about it being too hard to do.  The average computer user can do it easily by following the instructions that the partition or recovery discs give you.  If you are in doubt, you can refer to your manual, online tutorials or even bring your computer to a repair shop to have someone else do it for your peace of mind.