Format hard drive

I am trying to format my hard drive and re install windows 7 as my hard drive is ruuning out of memory tried removing some programs but is not helping much my hard drive is 232GB I only have 28GB left can anyone please advise me how to foramt my hard drive.

Thanks
Chris

Have you tried running disk cleanup? It will remove old restore points etc and free up some space. It might save you from having to re-install.
You can format your drive during the windows 7 install.
http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/1649-clean-install-windows-7-a.html?ltr=C

Thanks for yopur prompt reply I'll try that

Hi Chrismof and welcome to the Forum. In addition to the great advice given above, you should download and run the program CCLEANER provided in the link below.
Download CCleaner 3.06.1433 - FileHippo.com

Many of our members use and think very highly of this free program. I run it every day and it takes abot 2.5 seconds. It has a ton of great features, however it is not recommended that use the Registry Cleaner feature for the same reasons that you should not use ANY REGISTRY CLEANER with Windows 7.
Just run the cleanup feature and it will keep your system free of a lot of junk.
Hope this helps
Regards
JohnnyA

chrismof said:

I am trying to format my hard drive and re install windows 7 as my hard drive is ruuning out of memory tried removing some programs but is not helping much my hard drive is 232GB I only have 28GB left can anyone please advise me how to foramt my hard drive.

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You've probably got LOTS of data/documents, videos, pictures, something that adds up to a lot of space.

A very loaded Win7 (with lots of 3rd-party application programs) might still add up to only about 40GB or so. So to be using 200GB of your drive that means 160GB or so is "user data", located either under \Users or in other data folders you've created.

Although system restore points can certainly add up to lots of space (you can reduce the maximum amount of space it can use, by system settings, if that's really contributing to your overhead), I doubt that it's using a significant portion of the 160GB or so which is in use.

You might download and install an excellent free product named Treesize Free from here, and use it to tell you exactly where your space has gone. I use the non-free Treesize Professional version, but either will reveal where your hard drive has gone.

System restore points show up in the "System Volume Information" folder, so when you see your allocations arranged in reverse sequence (largest first, smallest last) it will be very obvious where you should focus your "pruning" efforts.

Of course, maybe you just need a larger/second hard drive if your user data needs are that large and probably increasing.

Thanks for the help

Yeah right. Move all or some of your data to a data partition. In the tutorial below it explains how to shrink C for that. But you do not have that option. So choose another partition or drive - even an external USB attached drive.

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/72427-data-partition.html

You can also create new folders in another place, move some of your stuff and then INCLUDE those folders into the appropriate Library (just right click on those folders and you will see).

Great suggestions here for cleaning up what you've got.

If you decide you still want to reinstall, perhaps to start fresh with fewer programs, new settings and only importing the files you really need, then here is a guide for Reinstalling Windows 7 to get a perfect install.

If you want to format your hard drive and einstall, you're going to need to back up all of your important files and data first. External drives are dirt cheap right now, so pick one of them up and copy off anything important. Then you can format your drive and reinstall.

johnnya said:

however it is not recommended that use the Registry Cleaner feature for the same reasons that you should not use ANY REGISTRY CLEANER with Windows 7.

Click to expand...

It would be nice if this myth would go away. There are plenty of registry cleaners to avoid, but CCleaner isn't one of them. It's helped me several times in solving errors (the reg cleaner portion) and it's benefits have been well discussed and documented.

+1. Stop tarring CCleaner by conflating it with the sales-scam reg cleaners. It is a genius app perfected over 15 years while many of us watched and participated.