theres no need to ever format a drive
if its getting slow defrag it
if its being replaced formatting dosn't actually permantly delete the data, the easiest way is to simply smash the hard drive to peices, actual smithereens
ifits full of crap then delete the crap

Not really. When formatting all / most data will be erased.

I'm always running cleaners, and frequently use the Windows XP Recovery Console to fix any disk errors. Rarely have any major problems in the past 1 1/2 years since getting the hyperthreading CPU, except putting in SP2 was a real pain. Had to reformat to get it done.

First post. Nice forum. I like them clean, neat, and not noisy. Came across this one from a Sofotex newsletter.

formatted data can be recovered, i've had personal experience with this, and some of the tools available are quite good, i was able to recover over 80% of my drive.
There is a better way to 'format' a drive, if you wish to destroy all the data, known as a Zero Fill. Available in many ways, including the maxblast boot floppy.
There are occassions to format, defrag can definatly put this off for a long time, but eventually it can be a good idea to start fresh.

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-William. § (marvin_gohan)

I must admit I format very often. Though I defrag and cleanup the system, there's nothing like a fresh and clean computer. Of course, I make a partition to backup my data since backing it up would make me reconsider it.

I've never done it, although I probably should have on occasion.

I am in the favor of reformatting only if it is really necessary whether the difference is of year two years or a month it doesn't matter. If my system works fine and I don't have any trouble I won't go for it