Is it possible to reformat a hard drive but leave the OS on it ? Im expecting a big fat "NO" on this one, but I hope I am wrong. Thanks in advance for the input.
I should add that this comp was custom made, and that I am looking to keep ONLY the OS on the hard drive, nothing else if possible.
The answer is what you expected "no". Formating a drive will wipe all references to any data on the drive. Depending on the type of format done the data will still be available on the hard drive but all of the pointers to the data will be removed. This makes hard drive appear to be empty and allows new data to be written over the existing data. What is typically referred to as a low level format will in fact render some or all of the data on the hard drive unreadable. In this case data is written to and read from the hard drive during the format process.
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