My C drive is getting full of crap and I'm wanting to wipe it clean.
How difficult would it be to wipe it clean and start fresh?
Is this something I could do or would it be safer to take it in and have someone do it that knows what they're doing?

Alright, well if you wanna wipe it clean its fairly simple. The question is Austin, does the C drive have your operating system on it? If so you will not want to do the following but if it is a separate drive you will want to do the following:

Depending on your motherboard you will have to go to the bios. You must first set your cd drive to boot before your harddrive does. You can generally change the boot order within the bios which is generally when you hit delete button as your computer is starting up. (This varies from pc to pc)

Once you have booted the windows XP CD (im assuming your on XP) you will want to go to continue and then install...you will run across something such as the Create a partion, delete a partion...you will want to delete then create a new one for the C drive (assuming you dont have XP installed on it).

Then just say yes to deleting it and create the new one. Once that is done you can get out of that and switch your boot order back to harddrive before cd. Now your extra harddrive will be clean.

I do have two separate drives, my primary drive and a secondary drive.
I do have XP and I have no idea which drive the OS is on, I can only assume it's on the C drive.
I do not have the actual XP CD, XP was pre loaded from the factory when I bought the computer. What I did find was 3 system recovery discs, 1 driver recovery CD and 1 application recovery CD. I'm guessing these will do me no good for what I'm trying to accomplish.

To check what drive its on check out both drives, in one of them there will be a Windows folder....whichever one has that is the one with the operating system.

C drive.

Try the discs, see if you can boot it if it is a recovery, or just try to run it and see your options. You may need to find a copy of an XP CD in order to reformat it.

http://helpdesk.its.uiowa.edu/windows/instructions/reformat.htm

Theres some help if you do happen to get your hands on a cd.

If your computer is a retail package it should have come with a "recovery cd". Pop that in and it will guide you.
If you have an OS CD you can format your C drive which will erase EVERYTHING. Most computers will ask you step by step what you want to do after a format. If you've never done it before it may take a couple of days to figure it out.
If your computer was a custom build you should be able to find software for your hard drive to make the format easy.
There is a way to format the hard drive in DOS, but I'd have to spend some time figuring it out, it's been a couple years.
My final words are.... If you want to try doing this yourself, you must anticipate things not going right. If you have a backup computer you're OK, it may take a couple days to get back up and running. The scariest part is if things go wrong. Your main resource is the internet in most cases. If you don't have a back up PC, you will have to call someone..... Who you gonna call?

Wow, you guys just had a full conversation as I typed out my post......

A backup pc with internet will help you tremendously. But whatever you do Austin, dont take your computer to like a Best buy or big place like that and get charged 100+ bucks for a reformat when it could just take an hour your first time. You may wanna just back all your stuff on C up and reformat all together. Your computer will run faster and will be very clean and organized.

Me myself, I reformat every 6 months, its just something I do, I backup and reformat. It keeps my pc virus free/bug free and allows me to never have to take it into a shop to get something repaired. I've never in my lifetime brought my pc to a shop to have it looked at, always solved issue myself.

Taking your computer into a computer shop or big retail chain is like taking your car to a stealership. I was getting my amp replaced at best buy and noticed some guy had a few bugs on Vista, he said he didnt have much data on it and it would be ok to reformat but they wanted to charge 75 to look at it, and 200 to attempt to fix it, they dont guarentee they'll fix it. How sad is that? I felt sorry for the guy as he reached into his wallet.

Start->Run

Type "cmd"

Type "C:\format"

Done. Drive formatted and all data removed.

Is it really that easy to reformat? If so I'm feeling wayyy stupid right now. If he did that wouldnt his screen go black or give out some sort of error?

no, it just deleted absolutely everything from the HDD and then you can put in an install disk. Or get away from windows and go Linux

Almost that easy.... It will ask you if you want a single partition or multiple, FAT16 or FAT32, it will throw a few questions out that the ametuer might not know how to respond to. Once it's formatted it will ask you how you would like to boot the system, it will go through a process of creating a fatdisk and installing drivers to be able to boot from the cdrom, then you will get a flashing cursor..... usually it's a matter of typing setup.exe, and answering more questions.......yada yada yada.

I was going to say, it should offer a few options.

You don't run FAT on Windows anymore, it's some other file system I believe (you can, but its slower). *EDIT* You run NTFS on Windows 2000 and newer.

Anyway, the easiest way is to run the Windows disk and it will prompt you for a format and reinstall. Just poke the buttons and sit back an enjoy. It's so simple, even a caveman could do it.