Reformatting your slow computer: an overview with metaphors

What is reformatting? Quite simply, on a computer reformatting is the process of erasing all of the data from a storage device or storage media, and setting it up to be used with the current operating system in use. You could possibly imagine it being like the using a hotel room. Its default state is clean and tidy, with everything in a specific place. Once someone has used it, many of these things will be moved, used, or even damaged, depending on the occupant. Reformatting would be akin to the cleaning crew coming along and cleaning and/or fixing everything up, making everything exactly as it was before the room was occupied.

In this day and age portable USB memory sticks are the common way to transport ones personal files, pictures, documents, games, and other files from computer to computer. Just as early as 6 years ago, 3 1/2“ floppy disks were still in use. Both these disks and the USB memory sticks come “pre-formatted”. In most cases if you need to use them for something else you simply delete the current contents and go. However, if something were to go wrong in the writing of some data or you caught a computer virus and the operating system could not read the contents, then you would have to reformat the media, which would reset and redefine the way files are stored on the disk or stick. This is also true for hard drives, and can be true for changes in operating systems, as different operating systems use different formats for reading and writing data.

To get a bit more technical, regardless of the medium, the way an operating system stores its files is a lot like a library. But as you also probably know, no two libraries are alike! The arrangement of books, magazines, front counter, and card indexes are all different, not to mention how and what information gets kept on the “card indexes” and with the “books”. I’ll use the Windows 2000/Windows XP file system, NTFS, as the example. Say your hard drive has one partition. That would be equivalent to a section of the library, like fiction versus non-fiction. Each partition has what is referred to as the MFT or Master File Table, sectors, and clusters. The MFT is like the card index. The exact isle, shelf, and space of each and every book is located in the MFT. Sectors are like the isles and shelves of the section, and clusters are the books themselves.

Now say there was a fire in the library, and it set off all of the sprinklers in the building, and everything was ruined, but the building was salvageable. The entire building would be cleaned up, the aisles straightened, the shelves would be cleared, and the card file would be full of empty cards. That, in a nutshell, is what reformatting is all about. Everything is set back up in a recognizable and useable way, but there is no data (or books, as the case may be).