reformat disk drive c error message

maybe someone can offer a suggestion. I was using mcafee to check for virus's and later on I couldn't access or find one of my Internet explorer favorite folders. My computer seemed to semi freeze up and afterward I got a message that said my C drive was not formatted and did I want to reformat it now message. I had three spyware and anti virus programs running at the same time and I'm not sure what happened. I don't know a lot about computers but it seemed that reformatting C drive would be something major to do and probably ruin my computer. I tried checking the microsoft data base, but I might as well have been shooting messages in bottles into outer space. Thanks for any suggestions that might be offered.

Only run one program at a time. They have a nasty little habit of conflicting with each other. I doubt your machine will need reformatted, but if it does, it's pretty easy. First, try rebooting your machine. That alone will probably fix it. If not, what kinda machine and operating system are you running?

I'm operating windows xp and tried doing a restore to yesterday but didn't help. IE keeps hanging up and I had to go to Mozilla to type this. I don't have a clue what could be wrong.

You should never ever ever run more than one antivirus resident/realtime module or two on demand scans at the same time. It's ok in most instances to have a secondary on demand scanner. Having two av scanners running at the same time is probably what caused your problem. Reboot in safe mode by restarting once the screen goes black start pressing F8 continuously... sometimes its delete depending on your setup... Keep pressing this key until a menu comes up. Choose to start the computer in safe mode. Once it boots up... uninstall all but one antivirus program. then reboot. See if that takes care of the problem.

1). On an IDE/ATA interface drive, it is almost impossible to destroy the HDD Format. Low Level format can only be done with specialized equipment. Format operation on a PC just sets up the file system, and makes sure the media is good.
2). More likely what you are seeing is the inability to read one or more very important sectors on the HDD. This does cause applications to 'freeze',and give strange error messages.

So step 1 is to run Scandisk on the partition with the full media test. Errors in some parts of the file system are not recoverable or reconstructable as far as MS is concerned. Scan disk will either be able to deal with the error, or it won't. If it won't deal with them, then you are going to have to start over (Fdisk and Format). The question is do you want to start over with a New HDD and try to copy whatever you can off the old one, or do you want to wipe out the existing HDD? On most systems today, you can simply connect the new HDD on the cable where the old was, and move the cable from the CD drive to the old HDD until you are done with it, Plan B is to buy an IDE PCI adapter, which gives you another pair of IDE ports. For you needs a 66, 100, or 133 MBs adapter will all work just fine.

If format cannot clear the media errors, it is time to serious consider replacing the HDD if you haven't already.

Other thing you may wish to do is to obtain a copy of the Disk Fitness Test. It is Floppy resident and bootable, and is used to test IBM/Hitachi HDD's in a non-destructive manner. I think you can download for free from the Hitachi Global storage system web site. If the DFT says the HDD is shot, there is no point in trying to reformat the HDD.

You might try system file checker from MS. Look in Windows help for info on how to use. You DO have current backups of your good stuff, right?

If you do thorough scandisk and it says it has bad sectors, your hard drive is toast either now or later. Sometimes the drive will work ok with a few bad sectors but almost always, more are to follow.

I am kind of computer illiterate unfortunately and use my computer for surfing the internet. I'm not sure how to backup my computer and when I checked a book that I have titled, "How to do everything with winodows XP" it explained how to back up the computer, saying click start/more programs/system tools/backup, I don't have anything in my start menu that says (more programs) and when I don't have a file on my computer that says backup wizard, and when I did a file search for backup, I got a list of 50 files that include the word backkup. I guess the reason I have tried to distance myself from the inner workings of this stuff is whenever I refer to some reference material it always seems to be incomplete or wrong. Searching my help files on my computer it said that I DON'T HAVE A BACKUP UTILITY, so I am at a loss and don't want to go to computer school to be able to come to the forums. Like most, I don't compute anything but simply use it to bring information to me for my personal life.

Hi Keith,

you don't always need a backup utility to backup your files. You can simply do it manually. Just burn files to CD or DVD or save to another drive. You may not have a bad HDD. If you put in your Windows XP disk and reboot, it will guide you through. You can either do a repair or new install. Make sure you backup any files before you do this though. When I'm at this point I usually always do a fresh install.