What happens when you format the HD?

[eLiu]

What exactly does the thing do when you tell it to format...? How are all our favorite 1s and 0s changed??

-eric

 

[eliya]

i believe all it does is write zeroes in that partition's space, so it wipes the file system, leaving the boot records intact.
quick-format just deletes the fat records, leaving the files as they are (duno what about ntfs here).
low-level format writes zeroes on all of the disk, including boot records, effectivly clearing everything there was.

(i may not be very accurate. these are just stuff from memory)

 

[ndee]

No zeros are written. It just gives the File Allocation Table free, so that you can write where you want on the partition. But I'm sure someone here can explain it better

 

[SCSIRAID]

The OS format command (format c: ) clears the FAT to indicate that all the space is available and no files exist. It then does a surface scan (read only) to locate any clusters that have defects flagged or that cannot be read. Those 'bad' clusters are marked as bad (used) in the FAT so the file system wont try to allocate them to a file. If you specify a 'quick' format then the scan for defects is bypassed.