Whether you're installing a brand-new drive or wiping an old one clean, formatting a drive is a basic maintenance task you should know how to do. Luckily, Windows 7 and 8 make this pretty easy.

In order to use a hard drive, or a portion of a hard drive, in Windows you need to first partition it and then format it. This process will then assign a drive letter to the partition allowing you ...

The only way to resolve the problem is to delete all the partitions, including the system reserved ones, and create new ones. The Windows installation process offers disk management tools.

By using the Diskpart utility, you can create partitions on a hard drive, delete partitions from a hard drive, format a particular partition on a hard drive, etc.

We've received notes from some readers indicating problems installing Mac OS X on drives that contain more than one partition. In these cases, some users find that formatting a drive with only a ...

In addition to the formatting, the partition scheme for managing the volumes on the drive will also need to be correct for the OS X boot drive.

Guide to create a new partition and install Mac OS X El Capitan to dual boot OS X Yosemite.