Formatting effects previous os install

[The Bigman]

If i had a windows session and its drivers installed and wiped the drives with a regular format. I install a new OS and drivers, will my apps still retain settings from the old setup even if its wiped completely?

[crainger]

Nope. It will be ALL gone. Nothing left. Wasted. BOOM Headshot.

[Bearclaw]

Nope. It will be ALL gone. Nothing left. Wasted. BOOM Headshot.


Hahaha, BOOM Headshot.

[grey_1]

Nope. It will be ALL gone. Nothing left. Wasted. BOOM Headshot.

LOL! yep :D

[rewt]

Regular format is not the same thing as wiping the drive completely, so technically you shouldn't be using these terms interchangeably. Data can be recovered quite easily after a quick format, or even a full format. The same cannot be said about a wiped disk. Data that had been wiped using DoD compliant algorithm or greater will be near impossible to recover completely.

That said, it would still be somewhat difficult to recover data from a formatted drive, IF you had rewritten data over top of it. So the others that posted are still mostly correct. Settings won't be retained unless you specifically recover them using special recovery software.

[The Bigman]

So when reloading OS and apps after a good format is fine and you won't find that apps are still keeping settings due to past installs on the drive?

I heard of someone doing this and found that his settings where still user defined and he did the full format vs the quick format with XP cd install.

It was weird because he thought he did a complete format which took a hour i believe, and something was weird but he found dll info from the previous install.

[rewt]

So when reloading OS and apps after a good format is fine and you won't find that apps are still keeping settings due to past installs on the drive?

Correct.

When properly formatting the disk with NTFS there should be nothing other than NT File System existing on the disk. NTFS itself uses hidden files to keep track of file system information, but there shouldn't actually be any dll files left over from the previous Windows installation. If there is files left over on a newly formatted partition then something has gone wrong. I have never seen this personally. The only way I have seen old files on a freshly formatted partition is by using special recovery software to recover them.

I heard of someone doing this and found that his settings where still user defined and he did the full format vs the quick format with XP cd install.

The only difference between quick format and full format is that full format checks the hard disk partition for bad sectors. The only reason to do full format is if you wish to try and verify the disk's integrity (its ability to read all sectors, a better tool is Spinrite by GRC which can actually verify both read & write integrity multiple times). Therefore, if you know the hard disk is good, a full format is totally unnecessary and a waste of time.

Neither Quick format nor Full format totally erase the contents of the partition. When Windows setup says "Caution! All data will be lost." most people think data will be gone forever. Thats not really the case. Sure it's lost, but that doesn't mean it can't be found again with data recovery tools.