What is the process for formatting a hard drive so just the operating system is left?

Unfortunately, you'll need a disc. Once you get one, pop it in. When the PC boots up, look for an option such as "repair" or "install". This should accomplish what you're asking.

As far as I know, you can't format a hard drive without wiping out everything on it, unless the OS is in a separate partition (so you can format the other partition(s). The other thing you can do is to manually delete all the non-OS folders, then do a "hard delete", which overwrites all the "empty" space with nonsense (e.g., zeros and ones). Then the deleted data will be unrecoverable, and the drive will be ready to be written to.

If the force isn't detected as a force and is rather detected as yet another piece of hardware, it can not be formatted by skill of abode windows. oftentimes there's a instruction manual thank you to reset exterior drives. I recommend you refer to your exterior force's instruction manual for a greater suitable answer. in case you like a greater particular answer, please respond with the make of the force. thank you! As an ingredient notice, Ubuntu is amazingly configuration based for its speed and that i might propose against switching from Vista to Ubuntu until you're very tech savvy. I desire Vista over Ubuntu nonetheless even nonetheless i'm properly rehearsed pc-sensible because of the fact it studies fewer crashes, on familiar runs smoother, an is greater good than open source OSes. have you ever tried lowering your Vista's RAM requirement by skill of optomizing for overall performance in the administration panel?

You can't. Formatting removes EVERYTHING including the OS. and BIOS has nothing to do with disk formatting. You need a system disk.

It doesn't work like that.