How to Format C From Recovery Console
You must have Windows XP or Windows 2000 on your C drive. Borrowing a friend’s disc is fine since you won’t actually be installing Windows. It could take up to several minutes to format C using Recovery Console. Follow these steps to format C drive using Recovery Console: You remove your entire operating system when you format C. This means that when you restart your computer and attempt to boot from your hard drive, it won’t work because there’s no longer anything there to load. What you’ll get instead is an “NTLDR is missing” error message, meaning there was no operating system found. If you don’t already know how to start Recovery Console, just click the link above. The process is a little confusing but if you can follow step by step instructions, you’ll be fine. The format command used in this way will format C with the NTFS file system, the recommended file system for use in most versions of Windows. Formatting a drive of any size will take some time; formatting a large drive may take a very long time.
More on Formatting C From Recovery Console
When you format C from the Recovery Console, you don’t truly erase any information, all you do is hide it from the next operating system installed. See our article on How to Wipe a Hard Drive if you actually want to destroy the data on the drive, preventing it from ever being recovered.
