is this right?

I do not know correctly but I have heard many people say so. They say that continuos formatting usually leave some bad sectors on the HDD. Although 6 times is very less to make the HDD go wrong. I have done around 20 times now and ot's still running fine. bourne

You can format is without doubt... But preferable method should be Format/B that means if You have some bad sector then new formated drive will has mark for that bad sector again.. otherwise it will not have any marks for bad sector and that can be also problem... so the bet method is to use win 98 or Me setup floppy disk to format disk by typing format/B I think on XP instalaion CD You don't have this option, or if its there than is ok... Hope You resolve Your problem... P.S. Removing virus can be easilly made if You have some experienced friend... I can't write it to You here now it gonna be book not post..

It may be different depending on the brand/quality of the drive. However, based on experience, I had my oldest drive for about 7 years now and roughly around 30+ times reformatted. It is still in excellent working condition. Nonetheless, installing a fresh operating system makes it faster (until the time you put in tons of files anyway) and one of the most effective ways of removing viruses.

I don't think it does anything as dramatic as destroying the hard disk, but it does do some damage, but as does just using the computer that is why a new computer works better than an old computer.

There are two kinds of formatting: low level and high level. For high level format, You can do formatting as much as you want. It does not destroy hard disk except the data. In actually, even you already format hard disk, you can rescue some data by using some software. For low level format, It does not destroy the hard disk directly but it makes the physical part of hard disk works hard. So, the life-time of hard disk may be shorten. This is because high level format is just marking some information in the table specified file structure but low level format is do zero-fill to all bit in the media. See this link for more information: http://www.storagereview.com/guide2000/ref/hdd/index.html