Windows 7 / Getting Started

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Maintaining Drives

Drives (floppies, hard drives, CDs, DVDs, and other types of storage media) seem to cause more computer problems than all other infuriating PC parts combined. Why? They move. And, unlike other parts of computers that are designed to move - printer rollers and keyboard springs and mouse balls, for example - they move quickly and with ultrafine precision, day in and day out.

As with any other moving mechanical contraption, an ounce of drive prevention is worth ten tons of cure. Unlike other moving mechanical contraptions, a good shot of WD-40 usually doesn't cure the problem.

Hard drives die at the worst possible moments. A hard drive that's starting to act flaky can display all sorts of strange symptoms: everything from long, long pauses when you're trying to open a file to completely inexplicable crashes and other errors in Windows itself.

Windows 7 comes with a grab bag of utilities designed to help you keep your hard drives in top shape. One of these utilities runs automatically every time your system shuts down unexpectedly, like when the dog finally chews through the power cord: The next time you start your system, Windows scans your hard drives to see whether any pieces of files were left hanging around.

You can spend a lot of time futzing around with your hard drives and their care and feeding if you wan, just three utilities suffice: Check Disk, Disk Cleanup, and Disk Defragmenter. You have to be a designated administrator to get them to work.

In addition to running an error check from time to time, I use the Windows Task Scheduler to periodically remove temporary files that I don't need; I use the Disk Cleanup utility. I tell you how to do that in the section "Scheduling the Task Scheduler," later in this tutorial.

What is formatting?

Drives try to pack a lot of data into a small space, and because of that, they need to be calibrated. That's where formatting comes in.

When you format a drive, you calibrate it: You mark it with guideposts that tell the PC where to store data and how to retrieve it. Every hard drive (and floppy disk, for that matter) has to be formatted before it can be used. The manufacturer probably formatted your drive before you got it. That's comforting because every time a drive is reformatted, everything on the drive is tossed out, completely and irretrievably.

You can format or reformat any hard drive other than the one that contains Windows by choosing Start → Computer, right-clicking the hard drive, and choosing Format. (To format a floppy disk, insert a disk into the floppy drive, rightclick, choose Format.) You can also "format" rewritable CDs, DVDs, USB (key) drives, and SD or other removable memory cards - delete all the data on them - by following the same approach. To reformat the drive that contains Windows, you have to reinstall Windows.