formating
formating
Yes, you can format a hard drive while retaining the operating system. This involves creating a bootable USB drive with the desired operating system and using tools like GParted or Rufus to format the drive without erasing data.
Usually I’d jokingly write something sarcastic... but... if your operating system lives on a different drive than the one you’re trying to format, as long as you didn’t pick the wrong partition, everything’s fine. Once you have just one drive with both OS and data files, formatting becomes a total wipe. That’s why always keep your system on its own drive =)