When my sister got her iMac(A) back a long time ago, at the time when Apple turned computers into art, I forgot to partition her drive(it was a humongous 4.3 GB!), but it is still going strong and was never reformatted. (When was it? 3-4 years ago? It seems like a thing of the past that computers had to be ugly, as if we were living in a different paradigm). My Performa that I got in 97, I reformatted when going from HFS to HFS+ with OS 8.1 and never did it again. I just reformatted my sisters brand new iMac 15" to make two partitions (and that saved me a lot of work, as Apple made some stupid backup CD's that makes you reformat your drive, just if you need an application, that was accidentally deleted - really stupid.).
I think the answer to your question is something like, if you have a good recovery CD, like DiskWarrior, then you will never have to reformat your drive. Not even for system upgrades. On the iBook that I am writing this, I installed OSX- prerelease, OS 10.0 and upgraded all the way to 10.1.5 without reformatting once. Reformatting is a PC-thing, I am sure. (this spring, we got a number of NT-PC's for number crunching at work. Out of 12 PC's, 4 had to be reformatted within 4 months, why, I have no idea, but that is probably how they work - unlike Macs!) Cheers, Kim On 30/08/02 19:27, "Donald Keenan" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Sorry to ask an oft repeated question, but how do you reinitialize the > hard drive? Does one have to use the reset button in anyway? > Thanks > On Friday, August 30, 2002, at 08:25 AM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > >> SO, you will have to save everything important you have in OSX some >> where, on >> say a Zip or CD, then initialize the hard drive and reinstall. -- The iMac List is sponsored by <http://lowendmac.com/> and... Small Dog Electronics http://www.smalldog.com | Refurbished Drives | - Epson Stylus Color 580 Printers - new at $69 | & CDRWs on Sale! | Support Low End Mac <http://lowendmac.com/lists/support.html> iMac List info: <http://lowendmac.com/imac/list.shtml> --> AOL users, remove "mailto:"; Send list messages to: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To unsubscribe, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For digest mode, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subscription questions: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Archive: <http://www.mail-archive.com/imac-list%40mail.maclaunch.com/> Using a Mac? Free email & more at Applelinks! http://www.applelinks.com
