Q: “Why does tech support think that formatting your hard drive is the only solution for all your PC problems?” (via Quora)
A. Holy smokes! Who told you that?
If that’s your experience with tech support, you really should change techs, brands, stores — or wherever it is you’re getting that advice.
Formatting a drive is usually a last-resort kind of thing — a way of starting over from scratch with a drive. It’s almost never a first choice.
In fact, off the top of my head, I can really think of only five instances where a reformat would be the first choice:
1. Prepping a PC for resale: A reformat is a good first step towards making sure the new owners won’t be able to read your old data. (There are other necessary steps to complete a drive-wiping process, but that’s not your question.)
2. Prepping for a wholesale change of operating system: Say you want to change a PC from Windows 10/NTFS to a Linux/ext4; your best bet is to reformat, wiping out the old setup in its entirety, and replacing it with the very different setup.
3. Correcting major disk errors: If a disk’s logical structure is badly scrambled (say, from a bad shutdown during a power failure); or if you need to correct some kinds of recoverable data errors; a reformat may allow the drive to be used again.
4. Disinfecting a compromised system so hopelessly riddled with malware, viruses, etc., that recovery is impossible, impractical, or uncertain. A total, low-level reformat should wipe out the infections.
5. Recovering a PC that’s hopelessly screwed up by user error. Sometimes, if users have messed up the guts of a system in serious and unknowable ways, it’s faster, easier, cheaper, and more certain to wipe out the mangled setup and start over.
If there are other major instances where “reformat your drive” is the first option, I’m failing to think of them.
So, if your techs are telling you that, and if the reason they give doesn’t fall into one of the five categories above, you really need better techs!
Permalink: https://wp.me/paaiox-ih
Want free notification of new content like this? Click here!
Have a comment? Want to ask Fred a new question? Click here!
Having spent 20 years in tech support at multiple companies (including major software and hardware manufacturers) I can tell you reformatting a drive is always the last resort. There are a number of options for most any problem encountered but the last resort is always a reformat. There is also a trade-off for expediency sake – the phone tech does have other customers he must deal with (and new calls coming in all the time) so if a preferred solution isn’t fixing the issue quickly a reformat will be done.
Exactly! I can’t imagine what techs that reader was dealing with.