ZukiTh

I am looking to restore my dell computer to its factory settings. The question that I have is whether doing so will have an effect on the second internal hard drive. My OS (Vista) is installed on the original hard drive (C) and my second hard drive (Z) contains 750gb of music, movies, pics, etc. Will doing a system restore format my Z drive as well, or will I still have access to the media files after the system restore? I know a bit about computers, but am far from an expert so I hope this question makes sense.

fenny

was the Z drive in the computer when u got it or did u add it?

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abc

A "system restore" in windows does not touch files, only programs & settings.

A "restore computer to factory settings" (which on a dell is reached by hitting F10 or something at the POST screen (i.e. shortly after you first turn it on) overwrites your C drive with the contents of a hidden partition on the C drive (said partition is labelled "restore" or "backup" or something in my computer)


However, to be completely safe... just unplug your Z drive, turn the PC on, do the restore, turn it off, plug in the Z drive, turn on computer and the C drive has been factory reset and the Z drive has been left alone.

Don't know how much PC building experience you have but a HDD has two connections. The wide flat one made up of 5 multicoloured wires is the power connector and the thin and narrow strip-like wire is the cable that carries the data. To be on the safe side, i'd unplug both. If unsure which is which, the C drive should be the one attached to the port labelled "SATA 0."

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This is getting repetitive.

ZukiTh

The Z drive was not original to the computer, I added it.

I figured that the factory restore would only format the C drive, but after extensive searching I was not able to find this addressed anywhere.

One more question. If I were to unplug the Z drive, do the factory restore, then plug the Z drive back in, wouldn't windows format the new hard drive before it would be readable on the system? Or, since it has already been formatted to windows during the original installation, will it basically be plug and play?

ZukiTh

Update:

Did the factory restore as described by abc, and everything worked perfectly. I did unhook my Z drive before I did the restore just in case. For reference I also left a smaller hard drive with very few files on it installed when I did the factory restore, and those files were also unaffected.

Thanks for the help!!