With the active use of a personal computer, a variety of situations may arise that require responsible decisions. In some unforeseen situations, formatting may be the only way out. And many users are seriously wondering how to format a hard drive through the BIOS. Nowadays, some people somehow think that this is impossible, but this statement is not true. This opinion is provoked by the fact that such formatting requires floppy disks, which are now outdated. So how to format a hard drive via BIOS?
First step
Of course, first you need to insert a floppy disk into the drive. Opening the control panel, which can be found in the Start menu, you need to find and select the option to install and remove programs and components of the Windows operating system. Disks for the computer can be for different purposes. In this case, we need a bootable one. In the window that opens, click on the appropriate tab “Boot Disk” and click on the “Create” button. Performing this action is quite simple, for this, follow the instructions that appear.
Second step
Now you need to completely turn off your PC, insert the disk into place and turn on the computer again. In the event that the BIOS contains the option to boot the system from the hard disk, you should change it to boot from the floppy disk. To do this, just before loading the system, click the "Del" button, which will allow you to enter the BIOS. Next, open the “Advanced BIOS Features” item, which displays several sub-items. In this menu, in addition to floppy disks and CDs, there can be several partitions with hard disks. This is because the hard drives for the PC can be installed in the computer in the amount of two or more pieces. We need the item “First Boot Device”. Using the “PgDn” and “PgUp” keys, you should set the “Floppy” line to the first place. Now close the window with the “Esc” key and exit the BIOS with saving data by pressing the “F10” button. After the actions taken, the system will first boot the floppy disk, not the hard disk.
Third step
After loading the PC, a menu will appear on the screen, in which the following item should be selected with the cursor keys: “No. 2. Start computer with CD-Rom Support”. The selection will need to be confirmed by pressing the enter key. After a few seconds of loading, the command line “A: \ ^” will flash at the bottom of the screen. Now you need to type the command Format C: and again confirm it with the enter key. Instead of drive C, you can format any other one; for this, you just need to change the letter in the command. For example, formatting drive D will be triggered by the following command: Format D :. After confirming the command entered, a warning appears that all files from this drive will be permanently deleted. To confirm, press the enter key again. Now the question of how to format a hard disk via BIOS should not cause any difficulties.
But remember that formatting will completely destroy all your data on the selected drive. After the procedure, it will be impossible to restore them. Therefore, before formatting the hard drive via the BIOS, the necessary files in the future must first be saved to any external media.