The first few sectors of any formatted partition will contain a Partition Boot Record (PBR), which if the partition holds an operating system could be essential in the boot process of that operating system.

The data will remain where it is but with no record of its existence it will be over-written in due course as new data takes its place. A re-format will essentially replace all the reference cards in the drawer with blank ones so that there is no longer any record of the files and data in the storage areas. Carrying out a re-format of an existing and currently formatted partition is the easiest way of cleaning data from a partition and making it ready for reuse. In the example below we are going to re-format an already formatted partition but the procedure is the same for unformatted or raw partitions, with the one exception that in some circumstances you may have to first assign a drive letter to an unformatted partition. On this page we are only discussing the formatting of existing partitions so if you are creating new partitions please also refer to the previous page of this guide. Performing a hard drive bad sector check. Today's mechanical hard drives are more reliable than previous generations but if you feel the need to do a full sector check, or you have cause to suspect a problem with a drive, then you can carry out a sector error check at any convenient time. With the immense size of today's hard drives a sector check could take several hours so recent formatting tools will skip the sector check or at the very least have an option for you to select a Quick Format. Many formatting tools will also routinely carry out an error check of every sector in the formatted space and this is what accounts for 99.99% of the time in a lengthy format operation. The important part of a typical format will take only seconds as all you are doing is writing a small amount of information to a few sectors at the start and also maybe the very end of a partition. When you format a device you are simply putting in place the structure of the file system that will be used to organize and source the data stored on the device. As a simple analogy are you going to have a filing cabinet with folders labeled alphabetically, or a card system arranged by category and the files stored on numbered shelves. In this article we cover how to format, then look at the recommended uses and limitations of the available files systems.įormatting a hard drive or any data storage device is merely defining the file system that the device is going to use. Entire libraries have been written about file systems but all we want to know is which should we choose for a particular operating system or that data partition or device we want to share across different platforms.

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