My understanding is this.
1. In the very early days of floppy disks and not much alternatives, a floppy disk off the manufacturing line had NO info of any kind. At first use a FORMAT operation actually wrote ALL of the data Tracks, each subdivided into Sectors by particular signals (and possibly filled with all zeros). As its second step that operation would then use specified tracks/sectors at the start of the disk to write real data that defined the very first Sector, wrote info to a specified set of Sectors to create the space for data to be the Directory of files, and then another set of Sectors to create the File Allocation Table which records which Sectors are in use by each file. Each computer system maker (e.g., Apple, Commodore, IBM, etc.) had their own proprietary system of how such space was defined and used (even down to the spacing of Tracks on a disk), and many had several versions of that as floppy storage evolved. So all floppies started completely blank until the Tracks and Sectors were first written. The process always used the entire capacity of the floppy disk for ONE "disk" or Volume.
2. Early hard disks were handled in virtually the same manner since each computer maker had their proprietary system for those.
3. As the IBM PC design and its several iterations began to dominate the field, a version of floppy disks became popular that already had all of its Tracks and Sectors written on the disk in one of several standard IBM layouts, but still void of data. Similarly, hard drives came that way from the factory. As each was installed, one had to run a Format operation to write to specified locations the data structures that created the Root Directory and the File Allocation Table. One item in the Root Directory was the spec for the numbers of Tracks and Sectors on the disk. But still, that Format process set the disk up to use ALL of its space for a single Volume. For hard disks, though, that Head and Sector count actually were encoded in the hardware BIOS chip of the drive along with a few other essential items. Together these were called the "Disk Type", of which there were about 47 distinct varieties.
4. As the sizes of HDD's and some floppy disks increased, the details of the File System used became outmoded and newer versions were introduced. So the Format process started to include in the Root Directory a specification of which File System it used.
5. As even larger Hard Drives were developed the system of identifying hardware parameters (Tracks, Sectors, Landing Zone, etc) changed to avoid the limited list of Disk Types. Instead, each HDD had all that data in its BIOS chip along with a process to spew that out when requested. In parallel, computer drive control systems had a routine to request that info and set itself up to deal with each HDD correctly. About the same time a new capability was introduced so that the large space available could be sub-divided into separate Volumes on the same HDD unit. To accommodate this the preparation process was altered into two steps. FIRST one had to INITIALIZE the HDD. The unit still came with all Tracks and Sectors already written by the manufacturer but with no data. Initialization wrote to a specific location at the start of the disk a brief table containing the name and size of the first Partition (the Master Partition) and its starting and ending points on the disk. It had extra space for the addition of up to three more Secondary Partitions' names and locations. Thereafter one had to run the FORMAT operation on EACH Partition individually. That would do the traditional Format tasks for that one Partition only. SOME OS's offered a tool called Preparation or even Initialization that combined the two processes, ensuring that this system would check the existing structures defined on the HDD and avoid encroaching on previously-defined Partitions. These tools also included, of course, a tool to selectively remove an existing Partition, but removing the Primary Partition would essentially remove them all.
6. Since the time when disks arrived from the manufacturers with all Tracks and Sectors created but empty, (stage 3 above), the FORMAT operation did NOT write anything to those empty tracks. So those tracks were untouched when the disk was re-Formatterd, and old data might be recoverable, although trying to organize a sequence of Sectors into a whole File is very difficult. More recently, though, FORMAT has been changed to write all zeroes into all Sectors and then go back and re-read that "info" to verify that the Sector CAN record and read back data accurately. This is a way for the drive unit to identify and mark for non-use any faulty Sectors as a part of the Format process. That way you are less likely to lose data to a "Bad Sector" nobody knew about. But this also means that recovering old data from a disk that has been re-Formatted is extremely unlikely.
I'm not demanding that it means one thing or the other.
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