how do i format a hard drive?

You don't say what your machine or OS is nor why you want to format a drive but here goes: Fdisk is an old utility for making and deleting partitions. To format a drive , open Windows Explorer, right click on the drive and the pop up will contain the format command choose it. It WILL effectively erase everything on the drive so you will lose all the data on it, however it doesn't really get rid of anything it just resets some pointers. Even if you do a low level format, dat acan still be recovered by an expert. If you REALLY want to stop some one reading the data on a drive the only effective way is to open it up and smash the platter with a hammer.

Terry
August 2006