Saturday, 15 June 2013

Reboot, reformat, reinstall

In computing, the initialism RRR stands for "reboot, reformat, reinstall". It is also sometimes referred to, even more simply, as 3R. The system is a widely accepted and humorous methodology employed by technical support technicians.

RRR is most commonly found amongst technical support people whose customers work with Microsoft Windows-based systems. This is arguably because Microsoft systems are so prevalent in modern computing, rather than the implication that it is more commonly needed for Microsoft products (either applications or operating systems) than alternatives such as Mac OS X, Unix or Linux.[citation needed]

RRR is intended to imply that there are three simple steps to making (almost) any problem go away, and suggest that the work of technical support can be done by anyone who has a basic knowledge of the systems. Its use is likely to be a transliteration of the English education initialism of the same name (see the three Rs), widely used in the later part of the 20th Century.

Some server administrators use 3R or RRR for "repartition, reformat, reinstall" in relation to servers that have been infected with a rootkit. Considering how aggressive some rootkits install themselves, repartitioning is often considered the safest extra step to be entirely sure the rootkit is completely removed before reinstall.

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