Formatting has become a very common phenomenon in Hard Drives. While most of us know about it in detail, we help you recollect few of the interesting facts about formatting your hard drives.

Here are 6 interesting facts about formatting your hard drive :

Meaning: Formatting a drive means preparing the chosen partition to be used by an operating system by setting up a file system (like NTFS or FAT32).

Stages (or) Process Involved:

There are three different stages or processes which are a part of formatting your hard drive. They are:

• Low Level Formatting
• Partitioning
• High Level formatting

In any new computer, the second stage occurs while installing the operating system. The third stage is almost the opposite of the first stage and can be controlled by the user unlike low level formatting which is done in the factory itself.

What is low level formatting?

Low level formatting can only be done once and that too by the manufacturer. Before low level formatting, the disk is completely clean and empty. Through low level formatting, tracks which include one or more blocks (called sectors) are formed. It is in these blocks the data can be stored. The indexing link called NTFS (New Technology File System) is created which manages the data on hard drive. All this comes under basic medium preparation.

What is partitioning?

Partitioning is the process which is done at the user end mostly the first time a computer is used. Through this process, the entire hard drive is made to access by operating system. The hard drive is then divided into several regions or partitions. Each of these partitions then has a separate file system.

What is high level formatting?

The high level formatting simply erases the data present in the particular partition of the drive. It is a faster operation and hence is also called the quick formatting. It scans for any defects in the drive and also installs a boot sector which contains a new file system.

Actually the data is not erased, but the indexing links are deleted. So the computer is clueless about the presence of these items and simply believes they are gone. Hence data recovery tools can help restore any such data (before they are over-written).

Hence formatting your hard drive is not same as deleting. And even after formatting your data isn’t ever clean like the first time you used it.