Topics Hard Drives. See all comments Am I missing something? Couldn't you just bring up a command prompt and type "format e:" - or some other drive letter? Wh y you need to do this dictates how you do this. This means that one can have up to 24 different hard drives, according to DOS. DOS can't recognize more than 24 partitions though there was the rumour that it could support up to disk drives , although some other operating systems may.
The limiting factor is simply the availability of letters. All partitions must have a letter. There are 26 letters, A: and B: are reserved for floppy drives, leaving 24 letters available. This command will not work with computers that run newer Windows operating systems or run on the NTSF file system.
When you format the hard drive disk, you will erase all the data, so be sure to make a backup of all files you want to keep. This will launch a DOS command window. If the drive had a previous name and that makes sense for you, by all means, keep it.
Drive letters are assigned during the Windows partitioning process but can easily be changed after the format is complete. See How to Change Drive Letters after the format process is done if you'd like to do that.
Next up is the file system choice. NTFS is the most recent file system available and is almost always the best choice. Only choose FAT32 FAT—which is actually FAT16—isn't available unless the drive is 2 GB or smaller if you are specifically told to do so by a program's instructions that you're planning on using on the drive. This is not common.
In the Allocation unit size textbox, choose Default. The best allocation size based on the size of the hard drive will be chosen. It's not at all common to set a custom allocation unit size when formatting a hard drive in Windows. Next is the Perform a quick format checkbox. Windows will check this box by default, suggesting that you do a "quick format" but we recommend that you uncheck this box so that a "standard format" is performed.
In a standard format , each individual "part" of the hard drive, called a sector, is checked for errors and overwritten with a zero —a sometimes painfully slow process. This procedure ensures that the hard drive is physically working as expected, that each sector is a reliable place to store data, and that existing data is unrecoverable.
In a quick format , this bad sector search and basic data sanitization is skipped entirely and Windows assumes that the hard drive is free of errors. A quick format is very fast. You, of course, can do whatever you like—either method will get the drive formatted. However, especially for older and brand new drives, we'd prefer to take our time and do the error checking right now instead of letting our important data do the testing for us later on.
The data sanitization aspect of a full format is nice, too, if you're planning on selling or disposing of this drive. The final format option is the Enable file and folder compression setting that is unchecked by default, which we recommend sticking with. The file and folder compression feature allows you to choose files or folders to be compressed and decompressed on the fly, potentially offering considerable savings on hard drive space.
The downside here is that performance can be equally affected, making your day-to-day Windows use much slower than it would be without compression enabled. File and folder compression has little use in today's world of very large and very inexpensive hard drives. In all but the rarest occasions, a modern computer with a large hard drive is better off protecting all the processing power it can and skipping on the hard drive space savings. Review the settings you've made in the last several steps and then click OK.
As a reminder, here's what you should see:. Look back at whatever previous steps you need to if you're wondering why these are the best options. Windows is usually pretty good about warning you before you might do something damaging, and a hard drive format is no exception. Click OK to the warning message about formatting the drive.
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