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When formatting a hard drive there are many possible approaches
and thus many ways of screwing things up. I will cover with a great deal of
detail all the aspects of what formatting hard drive really means.
First of all you must understand that when you format a hard drive everything
stored on it will be lost and by that I mean everything. You should be aware
that if you do the formatting for upgrading the file system that the partition
has there are most likely other less drastic methods. You can quite easily for
example upgrade from FAT16 to FAT32 without much hassle. Also if you want to
consider formatting a partition for the use of a Linux system you should be
aware that most recent Linux editions can quite easily mount FAT partitions,
with NTFS partitions it is quite a different story as they are encrypted.
Another reason for which you might choose to format a hard drive is to get
rid of the sensitive information found on it. If you do the formatting for this
purpose make sure you do a full format, otherwise your data can still be rather
easily recovered and worst still even you format the data correctly a really
committed individual can still extract quite a large amount of data from it
using more advanced techniques. To really get rid of sensitive information you
should use programs that overwrite it several times in different random patterns.
Of course you might just want to format a brand new hard drive simply to create
some usable partitions in which case all of the above ranting is rather useless.
There are some occasions when you meet a lot of errors during the format process
and you may still not be able to properly create those partitions. In this unfortunate
case there is only one solution and it is not a pretty one. This will typically
happen on very old hard drives who have developed some bad sectors, some of
them in really critical areas. The answer to this problem is the low format
option. This will effectively erase anything on the hard drive (not just a single
partition) and will mark all the bad sectors. Be careful though because by this
method you will literally lose everything and you will have to create partitions
again. Another drawback of this method is that it can be done only from old
computers who have this utility in their BIOS. The most recent computers simply
don't have this function implemented, don't know why really. It is probably
the manufacturers' subtle hint to go get a new hard drive.
If you want to know specifics on formatting a hard drive and partitions in
MS-DOS, Windows 98 or Windows XP check the next chapters.
Part 2:
Formating hard drive - the old style
Formating hard drive old school style is a skill that any seasoned hardware veteran must know like a bible. Windows 98 is now 8 years, but its boot disk is still the preferred method of formatting hard drive for most of the PC enthusiasts.
This sort of skill is not something that you can learn in 5...
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When
formatting a hard drive there are many possible approaches
and thus many ways of screwing things up. I will cover with
a great deal of detail all the aspects of what formatting
hard drive really means.
