Laptop hard drives

Yes, it will remove everything. Before doing this make sure you have all the necessary disks to reinstall your OS.

Actually, not quite. Formatting does not erase (zero) the data on the HDD. To achieve that, and be positive that no trace of malware is left behind, a low-level formatting is necessary. Free tools to do that, like killdisk, are available on the net.

Hi,HE,is it easy enough to format my ide drive,?where can i get instructions? I think i have my disks,sound,XP home,wireless disk and a Notebook utilty disk.Thanks,Barry.

I think zero filling is overkill. Formatting will mark all sectors unused and they will be overwritten with new data.

If you want to go ahead and do the regular format, just pop in the XP disk, reboot from it and launch the install. It will get to the point where you choose what disk/partition to use, pick the one that has already Win on it, the in Drive (advanced) options select to format the disk. Installation wizard will do the rest.
Formatting is an option present during Win installation, unless it is a disk that has not been used before, i.e. not initialized, in which case formatting becomes a mandatory step.

In most of the cases you're right. However, if that were a guarantee, there would be no need for low-level formatting EVER. Of course, it is up to the user to decide to what level to push their protection. I'm just saying there IS malware that resides after formatting, it is just not that common.

Thanks. H70..

welcome. Don't forget to reinstall all the drivers and then the utilities and then pick an antivirus for your system. I personally use Avast free, never had a problem with it and is very resource-friendly.