Why partition and format a drive?

shoutman

Hey guys,
As my computer has basically used up its 80gb hard drive I decided to invest in an external hd. After a bit of reading about the subject I decided to go for a western digital mybook 250gb.

Anyway I noticed in the manual it talked about partitioning and formatting the drive.

What exactly does this mean and what is the point of it?

Cheers
Luke

Villain

The drive needs to partioned and formatted before it can be accessed by windows, you can creat a couple of partitions which will appear as seperate drives in windows or you can just have one partition.

Then the partition will need to be formatted to NTFS or FAT 32 before you can use it with windows.

jcoote

formatting is basically just making the drive readable by windows (NTFS or FAT32)

partitioning is spliting the drive into several part

this is handy because you can keep your system software (ie your os eg windows) on a seperate partition than other files

also it speeds up the respose time of your hard drive cos a partition is a smaller more defined space

PogMoThoin

Partioning is dividing it up in2 different sections.
Formatting is preparing it, to allow it to store info. if you format it with info on it you will lose the info.

If you are using Xp i suggest you check whether the ex drive is FAT, FAT32 or NTFS by rt clicking my comp & checking properties. If its FAT or FAT32 i suggest formatting in NTFS. If youre using 98 i'd leave it alone. What os you using?

mukki

partition
with hard drives a "partiton" is the name given to a section of the harddrive set up for use by windows, it kinda the wrong word as people probably think a partiton is a divider set up to split the drive into 2 or more sections

you have you c drive on windows this is just a partiton on the harddrive, if you make 2 partitions then you will have a c and d drive


format
you must set up the new partiton so that the operation system can use it, different operation systems format using different methods so can't under stand each others disks (well OS's can be very compatable these days)


EDIT, well from the other replys I guess i was right about partitons being a confusing word to use

DonkeyStyle \o/

AFAIK partitioning has been largely about cluster size, larger partitions forcing larger cluster sizes and wasting space per cluster when they're not 100% used.
So smaller partitions/clusters would give you better storage efficiency.
Nowdays though, with huge drive capacity and the popularity of NTFS which (afaicr) is more efficient... I'm not sure anyone bothers about cluster size anymore... was more of a big deal for people when FAT32 was the talk of the town and storage space costed more per meg.
Personally I partition for the sake of having seperate drives with their own storage purposes.

Formatting as mentioned, just prepares the drive to be written to... sets up the ground work if you like.

Wouldn't worry about it terribly really.

shoutman

Cheers everyone
thanks for the instant replies.

mukki

way to go and overcomplicated it donkey

mate, windows will do it all for ya, just keep pressing next!

SorGan

mukki wrote:

way to go and overcomplicated it donkey

mate, windows will do it all for ya, just keep pressing next!

bet me to it, yea just bang in windows and grab some tea, any partitions you wish to add later on, can be done with a prog called partition manager or the like(if you wish to experement that is)