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Formatting a disk for use by an operating system and its applications typically involves three different processes. [e]Low-level formatting (i.e., closest to the hardware) marks the surfaces of the disks with markers indicating the start of a recording block (typically today called sector markers) and other information like block CRC to be used later, in normal operations, by the disk ...
A basic data partition can be formatted with any file system, although most commonly BDPs are formatted with the NTFS, exFAT, or FAT32 file systems. To programmatically determine which file system a BDP contains, Microsoft specifies that one should inspect the BIOS Parameter Block that is contained in the BDP's Volume Boot Record .
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.
For example, if Windows Disk Management (Windows 2000/XP, etc.) is used to delete a partition, it will overwrite the first sector (relative sector 0) of the partition before removing it. It still may be possible to restore a FAT or NTFS partition if a backup boot sector is available.
WIMBoot reduces Windows disk usage by keeping system files in a compressed WIM image on a separate hidden disk partition. [82] Similarly to CompactOS, Windows system directories only contain sparse files marked by a reparse point with a WOF tag, and Windows Overlay Filter driver decompresses file contents on-the-fly from the WIM image.
In 2010, hard-disk manufacturers introduced drives with 4,096‑byte sectors (Advanced Format). [3] For compatibility with legacy hardware and software, those drives include an emulation technology ( 512e ) that presents 512‑byte sectors to the entity accessing the hard drive, despite their underlying 4,096‑byte physical sectors. [ 4 ]
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The volume serial number is a 32-bit number determined by the date and time on the real-time clock on the current computer at the time of a disk's formatting. Previously, determination by the OS of whether a disk was swapped was done by reading the drive's volume label. However, even at that time the volume label was not required to be unique ...