- DISK FORMATTING EXPLAINED INSTALL
- DISK FORMATTING EXPLAINED SERIES
- DISK FORMATTING EXPLAINED WINDOWS
“The sectors are arc-shaped pieces of a track. (An individual disk track can store more than a megabyte of data, which would be very inefficient for storing small files.) So, as part of the formatting process, tracks are divided into several numbered, equal divisions known as sectors. A disk track is too large to manage the data effectively as a single storage unit.
DISK FORMATTING EXPLAINED SERIES
“All hard disks are formed of a series of tracks – sometimes called rings – that can contain data. “So how is the space organised on the hard drive, once it is formatted?” asked Rupert. As a last resort, reformatting a disk can also be a way of removing viruses from the computer, or fixing other errors.” In that case, you would want to reformat the disk or partition for the new operating system.
DISK FORMATTING EXPLAINED INSTALL
“Well, sometimes you might want to go back to scratch to install a new operating system on the disk or on a partition of the disk. “So should you ever reformat a hard drive?” asked Rupert. “All the books are still there, but they are really difficult to find.” “Ah, it’s a bit like you have destroyed the indexing system in a large library,” said Rupert. So it usually needs special tools to get it back.” “Well, if you reformat a disk that has already got data on it, the data does not disappear, but it can’t be retrieved by the operating system in the usual way. “I had a … ‘friend’ once who formatted his disk by accident one day and he lost all of his data,” said Rupert, looking sad. “Once a disk has been formatted, you can write data to it.” “Some formatting procedures may also check the physical structure of the disk for errors, recording their location so that data is not written to these locations.
DISK FORMATTING EXPLAINED WINDOWS
Anyway, you need at least one partition on the drive and, if you have more than one partition, the formatting process will cause them to be displayed as separate drives by your operating system – for example, in Windows Explorer or Finder on a Mac. If you want to run more than one operating system on your machine, you can even create partitions that have different file systems. You can have a single partition that contains all the storage space on the drive or divide the space into several different partitions. “The most important thing that happens when a disk is formatted is that at least one area of the disk must be loaded with the operating system’s file system in readiness for it to store data. This is because we can prepare almost any hard disk drive to work with any operating system and its file system by going through a process, called formatting it, before we try to save any data to it. “Good question,” said Gloria, “but the answer is ‘no’.
“If there are lots of different operating systems, each with its own kind of file system, do you need a different kind of disk drive for each?” asked Rupert.