 Formatting a hard drive using MS-DOS Disk formatting is the process of preparing a hard disk or other storage medium for use, including setting up an empty file system. A variety of utilities and programs exist for this task; pictured to the right is the iconic FORMAT.COM of MS-DOS and PC-DOS. Screenshot of Format C: using a MS-DOS boot disk. ...
Screenshot of Format C: using a MS-DOS boot disk. ...
Microsofts disk operating system, MS-DOS, was Microsofts implementation of DOS, which was the first popular operating system for the IBM PC, and until recently, was widely used on the PC compatible platform. ...
Typical hard drives of the mid-1990s. ...
The terms storage (U.K.) or memory (U.S.) refer to the parts of a digital computer that retain physical state (data) for some interval of time, possibly even after electrical power to the computer is turned off. ...
It has been suggested that Crash counting be merged into this article or section. ...
Microsofts disk operating system, MS-DOS, was Microsofts implementation of DOS, which was the first popular operating system for the IBM PC, and until recently, was widely used on the PC compatible platform. ...
IBM PC-DOS was one of the three major operating systems that dominated the personal computer market from about 1985 to 1995. ...
Large disks can be partitioned, divided into logical sections that are formatted with their own file systems. This is normally only done on hard disks because of the small sizes of other disk types, as well as compatibility issues. In computer engineering, hard disk drive partitioning is the creation of logical divisions upon a hard disk that allows one to apply operating system-specific logical formatting. ...
In computer engineering, hard disk drive partitioning is the creation of logical divisions upon a hard disk that allows one to apply operating system-specific logical formatting. ...
A corrupted operating system can be reverted to a clean state by formatting the disk and reinstalling the OS, as a drastic way of combatting a software problem or malware infection. Obviously, important files should be backed up beforehand. // An operating system (OS) is the software that manages the sharing of the resources of a computer. ...
Computer software (or simply software) refers to one or more computer programs and data held in the storage of a computer for some purpose. ...
It has been suggested that Grayware be merged into this article or section. ...
Two levels of formatting
Formatting a disk involves two quite different processes known as low-level and high-level formatting. The former deals with the formatting of disk surfaces and installing characteristics like sector numbers that are visible to, and used by, the disk controller hardware, while the latter deals with file system specific information written by the operating system. Process (lat. ...
The disk controller (or hard disk controller) is the circuit which allows the CPU to communicate with a hard disk, floppy disk or other kind of disk drive. ...
It has been suggested that Crash counting be merged into this article or section. ...
// An operating system (OS) is the software that manages the sharing of the resources of a computer. ...
Low-level formatting of floppy disks The low-level format of floppy disks (and early hard disks) is performed by the disk drive hardware.
The process is most easily described with a standard 1.44 MB floppy disk in mind. Low-level formatting of the floppy normally writes 18 sectors of 512 bytes each on each of 160 tracks (80 on each side) of the floppy disk, providing 1,474,560 bytes of storage on the floppy. A floppy disk is a data storage device that is composed of a disk of thin, flexible (floppy) magnetic storage medium encased in a square or rectangular plastic shell. ...
In the context of computer hardware, a sector is a sub-division of a track on a magnetic disk or optical disc. ...
In computer science a byte (pronounced bite) is a unit of measurement of information storage, most often consisting of eight bits. ...
Sectors are actually physically larger than 512 bytes as they include sector numbers, CRC bytes, and other information required in order to identify and verify the sector during reading and writing. These additional bytes do not add to the overall storage capacity of the disk. A cyclic redundancy check (CRC) is a type of function that takes as input a data stream of any length and produces as output a value of a certain fixed size. ...
To complicate matters, different low-level formats can be used on the same media; for example, large records can be used to cut down on interrecord gap size.
Several freeware, shareware and free software programs (e.g. GParted, FDFORMAT, NFORMAT and 2M) allowed considerably more control over formatting, allowing the formatting of high-density 3 1/2" disks with a capacity up to 2 MB. The term Freeware refers to gratis proprietary software with closed source. ...
Look up shareware in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ...
Clockwise from top: The logo of the GNU Project (the GNU head), the Linux kernel mascot Tux the Penguin, and the FreeBSD daemon Free software is a term coined by Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation[1] to refer to software that can be used, studied, and modified without...
GParted stands for GNOME Partition Editor. ...
This article needs to be cleaned up to conform to a higher standard of quality. ...
2M is a DOS program by the Spanish programmer Ciriaco GarcÃa de Celis. ...
Techniques used include:
- head/track sector skew (moving the sector numbering forward at side change and track stepping to reduce mechanical delay),
- interleaving sectors (to minimize sector gap and thereby allowing the number of sectors per track to be increased),
- increasing the number of sectors per track (while a normal 1.44 MB format uses 18 sectors per track, it's possible to increase this to a maximum of 21), and
- increasing the number of tracks (most drives could tolerate extension to 82 tracks – though some could handle more, others jammed).
Linux supports a variety of sector sizes, and DOS and Windows support a large-record-size DMF-formatted floppy format. [citation needed] This article is about operating systems that use the Linux kernel. ...
Instructions on how to use the directory command. ...
Windows redirects here. ...
Distribution Media Format (DMF) is a format for floppy disks that Microsoft used to distribute software. ...
Low-level formatting (LLF) of hard disks User instigated low-level formatting (LLF) of hard disks was common in the 1980s. Typically this involved setting up the MFM pattern on the disk, so that sectors of bytes could be successfully written to it. With the advent of RLL encoding, low-level formatting grew increasingly uncommon, and most modern hard disks are embedded systems, which are low-level formatted at the factory with the physical geometry dimensions and thus not subject to user intervention. Typical hard drives of the mid-1990s. ...
This article does not cite any references or sources. ...
Modified Frequency Modulation, commonly MFM, is a line coding scheme used to encode information on most floppy disk formats, which include the floppy disk formats used in most CP/M machines as well as PCs running DOS. MFM is a modification to the original FM (frequency modulation) scheme for encoding...
Run Length Limited codes, or RLL codes are widely used in hard disk drives (and notably digital optical discs, such as CD, DVD and BluRay disc) to prevent long stretches of no transitions, and therefore decoding uncertainty, from creeping in. ...
A router, an example of an embedded system. ...
Early hard disks were quite similar to floppies, but low-level formatting was generally done by the BIOS rather than by the operating system. This process involved using the MS-DOS debug program to transfer control to a routine hidden at different addresses in different BIOSs. This article does not cite any references or sources. ...
DEBUG is a DOS / MS-DOS / WINDOWS command. ...
Starting in the early 1990s, low-level formatting of hard drives became more complex as technology improved to: For the band, see 1990s (band). ...
- use RLL encoding,
- store a higher number of sectors on the longer outer tracks (traditionally, all tracks had the same number of sectors, as is still the case with floppy disks),
- encode track numbers into the disk surface to simplify hardware, and
- increase the mechanical speeds of the drive.
Rather than face ever-escalating difficulties with BIOS versioning, disk vendors started doing low-level formatting at the factory. Today, an end-user, in most cases, should never perform a low-level formatting of an IDE or ATA hard drive, and in fact it is often not possible to do so on modern hard drives outside of the factory. [1] [2] Run Length Limited codes, or RLL codes are widely used in hard disk drives (and notably digital optical discs, such as CD, DVD and BluRay disc) to prevent long stretches of no transitions, and therefore decoding uncertainty, from creeping in. ...
Economics and commerce define an end-user as the person who uses a product. ...
Disk Reinitialization While it's impossible to perform an LLF on most modern hard drives (since the mid-1990s) outside the factory, the term "low-level format" is still being used (erroneously) for what should be called the reinitialization of an IDE or ATA hard drive to its factory configuration (and even these terms may be misunderstood). Reinitialization should include identifying (and sparing out if possible) any sectors which cannot be written to and read back from the drive, correctly. The term has, however, been used by some to refer to only a portion of that process, in which every sector of the drive is written to; usually by writing a zero byte to every addressable location on the disk; sometimes called zero-filling. Look up zero in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ...
In computer science a byte (pronounced bite) is a unit of measurement of information storage, most often consisting of eight bits. ...
The present ambiguity in the term "low-level format" seems to be due to both inconsistent documentation on web sites and the belief by many users that any process below a "high-level (file system) format" must be called a low-level format. Instead of correcting this mistaken idea (by clearly stating such a process cannot be performed on specific drives), various drive manufacturers have actually described reinitialization software as LLF utilities on their web sites. Since users generally have no way to determine the difference between a true LLF and reinitialization (they simply observe running the software results in a hard disk that must be partitioned and "high-level formatted"), both the misinformed user and mixed signals from various drive manufacturers have perpetuated this error. Note: Whatever possible misuse of such terms may exist (search hard drive manufacturers' web sites for all these terms), many sites do make such reinitialization utilities available (possibly as bootable floppy diskette or CD image files), to both overwrite every byte and check for damaged sectors on the hard disk.
One popular method for performing only the "zero-fill" operation on a hard disk is by writing zero-bytes to the drive using the Unix dd utility (available under Linux as well) with the "/dev/zero" stream as the input file (if=) and the drive itself (either the whole disk, or a specific partition) as the output file (of=). This article or section includes a list of works cited or a list of external links, but its sources remain unclear because it lacks in-text citations. ...
This article is about operating systems that use the Linux kernel. ...
In Unix-like operating systems, /dev/zero is a special file that provides as many null characters (ASCII NULL, 0x00; not ASCII character digit zero, 0, 0x30) as are read from it. ...
High-level formatting High-level formatting is the process of setting up an empty file system on the disk, and installing a boot sector. This alone takes little time, and is sometimes referred to as a "quick format". A boot sector is a sector of a hard disc, floppy disc, or similar data storage device that contains code for bootstrapping programs (usually, but not necessarily, operating systems) stored in other parts of the disc. ...
In addition, the entire disk may optionally be scanned for defects, which takes considerably longer, up to several hours on larger harddisks.
In the case of floppy disks, both high- and low-level formatting are customarily done in one pass by the software. In recent years, most floppies have shipped preformatted from the factory as DOS FAT12 floppies. It is possible to format them again to other formats, if necessary. File Allocation Table (FAT) is a partially patented file system developed by Microsoft for MS-DOS and was the primary file system for consumer versions of Microsoft Windows up to and including Windows Me. ...
Formatting in DOS Under MS-DOS and PC-DOS, disk formatting is performed by the FORMAT program. FORMAT usually asks for confirmation beforehand to prevent accidental removal of data, but some versions of DOS had an undocumented /AUTOTEST option; if used, the usual confirmation is skipped and the format begins right away. The WM/FormatC macro virus uses this command to format the C: drive as soon as a document is opened. Microsofts disk operating system, MS-DOS, was Microsofts implementation of DOS, which was the first popular operating system for the IBM PC, and until recently, was widely used on the PC compatible platform. ...
IBM PC-DOS was one of the three major operating systems that dominated the personal computer market from about 1985 to 1995. ...
In computing terminology, a macro virus is a virus that is written in a macro language. ...
There is also the undocumented /U parameter that performs an unconditional format which overwrites the entire partition [1], preventing the recovery of data through software (but see below).
Recovery of data from a formatted disk As with regular deletion, data on a disk is not fully destroyed during a high-level format. Instead, the area on the disk containing the data is merely marked as available (in whatever file system structure the format uses), and retains the old data until it's overwritten. If the reformatting is done with a different file system than previously existed in the partition, some data may be overwritten that wouldn't be if the same file system had been used. However, under some file systems (e.g., NTFS; but not FAT), the file indexes (such as $MFTs under NTFS, "inodes" under ext2/3, etc.) may not be written to the same exact locations. And if the partition size is increased, even FAT file systems will overwrite more data at the beginning of that new partition.
From the perspective of preventing the recovery of sensitive data through recovery tools, the data must either be completely overwritten (every sector) with random data before the format, or the format program itself must perform this overwriting; as the DOS FORMAT command did with floppy diskettes, filling every data sector with F6h bytes. Instructions on how to use the directory command. ...
References
See also It has been suggested that File wipe be merged into this article or section. ...
To meet Wikipedias quality standards, this article or section may require cleanup. ...
Data recovery is the process of salvaging data from damaged, failed, corrupted or inaccessible primary storage media when it cannot be accessed normally. ...
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