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Disk formatting is the process of preparing a data storage device such as a hard disk drive, solid-state drive, floppy disk, memory card or USB flash drive for initial use. In some cases, the formatting operation may also create one or more new file systems .
The diskpart utility is used for partitioning internal hard drives but can also format removable media such as flash drives. [4] It has long been possible, theoretically, to partition removable drives – such as flash drives or memory cards – from within Windows NT 4.0 / 2000 / XP; e.g., during system installation.
(Windows drive letters do not correspond to partitions in a one-to-one fashion, so there may be more or fewer drive letters than partitions.) Microsoft Windows 2000 , XP , Vista , and Windows 7 include a ' Disk Management ' program which allows for the creation, deletion and resizing of FAT and NTFS partitions.
In computing, format is a command-line utility that carries out disk formatting. It is a component of various operating systems , including 86-DOS , MS-DOS , IBM PC DOS and OS/2 , Microsoft Windows and ReactOS .
Formerly, on disks formatted using the master boot record (MBR) partition layout, certain software components used hidden sectors of the disk for data storage purposes. For example, the Logical Disk Manager (LDM), on dynamic disks, stores metadata in a 1 MB area at the end of the disk which is not allocated to any partition.
File Allocation Table (FAT) is a file system developed for personal computers and was the default filesystem for the MS-DOS and Windows 9x operating systems. [citation needed] Originally developed in 1977 for use on floppy disks, it was adapted for use on hard disks and other devices.
Windows 7 also supports the newer exFAT file system. As the ReadyBoost cache is stored as a file, the flash drive must be formatted as FAT32, NTFS, or exFAT in order to have a cache size greater than FAT16's 2 GB filesize limit; if the desired cache size is 4 GB (the FAT32 filesize limit) or larger, the drive must be formatted as NTFS or exFAT.
Hard disk drive format efficiency with Advanced Format 4K technology and distributed ECC. Having a huge number of legacy 512-byte-sector–based hard disk drives shipped up to the middle of 2010, many systems, programs and applications accessing the hard disk drive are designed around the 512-byte-per-sector convention.