Hi. How many times can a hard drive be formatted with a clean install of windows xp? Will this damage the H/D? I have just purchased a new 200GB Maxtor DiamondMax 10 IDE with 8MB Cache. Every thing is great, but I have been told to format and reinstall windows every six months or so, and start from freash. Will this damage the hard drive? will it not last as long? Many thanx :Steve

Every six months seems a little excessive for formatting an HDD. I don't know if it will damage it, but I see no need for formatting so often unless absoluetly neccessary. Dell Dimension 4600i Windows XP Home v2002 SP2 Microsoft Office 2003 Pentium 4 @ 2.8GHz 512MB DDR RAM 40GB HD ...If my computer's not happy, I'm not happy.

Many thanx for your very quick responce. Yes it did seem to me to be quite excessive every six months, just wanted to know if formatting this offen would shorten the life of my H/D. cant seem to find any info on formatting, and the life span, of the H/D. Purhaps I worry to much....LOL Thanx again: Steve

Formatting the hard drive, in the sense that most of us do it--that is something like a W98 bootdisk, with the Microshaft DOS based "format" is not really formatting the drive, it simply erases the files, so to speak. It will not damage the drive. If you try and fdisk (partition) a drive that has some marked bad sectors, you will remove the sector marking and have trouble. I would NOT just go around formatting the drive every 6 months. Wait till you know you have trouble. Use something like adaware, spybot, a good antivirus product, and use a firewall.