Low level formatting
Formatting is the first step in making the drive ready for data storage and retrieval. At this stage, the drive is being physically divided into tracks and sectors. Low-level formatting stays unchanged for the entire life of the drive unless the drive is re-formatted. Nowadays, drives are usually sold with low level formatting already done.

Partitioning
Partitioning divides the drive into logical drives (C:, D:, E:, etc.). Every drive has at leas one "primary partition" (C:) and may have many extended partitions. The primary partition contains drive booting information in the Master Boot Record (MBR) and also keeps a record of all other partitions. A partition is usually made using the FDISK.exe program.

High-level formatting
High-level formatting prepares drive partitions for the operating system by creating a root directory, from which all other subdirectories could be created, and creating a File Allocation Table (FAT), which keeps track of all information on the disks and all the relationships between different pieces of information. A loss of the FAT translates into loss of data, since the system will not be able to attribute data to specific files even if the data themselves are intact. This operation is usually done using the FORMAT.exe program.

File System

The file system is a high-level environment allowing the user to interact with the data stored in files on various storage systems. It allows the user to actually address data as files by keeping track of the file location, name, length, etc. There are three primary file systems on today's IBM-based PC:

FAT16 (Dos and Windows 3.x)
FAT32 (Windows 95 and higher)
NTFS (Windows NT)

The main problem with FAT 16 is that it is unable to address more than 2.1 GB of data on each logical drive of the hard disk - a small number by today's standards. This means that if you use the FAT16 file system with a larger drive, you will be forced to partition it with the FDISK program to logical disks of not larger than 2 GB. Otherwise, you will lose some of drive's capacity. This is getting harder to do with modern disk drives of 20 GB and more in capacity. Another problem is with the way FAT16 divides sectors into clusters: the cluster size is only 2 KB for logical disks less than 128 MB and 32 KB when the disk size exceeds 1 GB. This means that the system will allocate 32 KB for even the smallest files of 1 KB.

There is no problem with addressing data with the FAT32 and NTSF systems. Problems won't appear until about 4 TB). The minimum cluster size for FAT32 is reduced to 16 KB. The main problem here is that the FAT32 and NTFS systems can not read each other's disk partitions, which requires reformatting (FDISK and FORMAT) the drive when the system is changed.

Note: Windows 98 allows changing older, FAT16 file system to newer 32-bit FAT32 using a built-in program Drive Converter (FAT32), which can be found in START --> PROGRAMS --> ACCESSORIES --> SYSTEM TOOLS --> Drive Converter (FAT32).

Drive interface (s)

Here find about the drive's interfaces.

Drive installation

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