A couple software questions

Just a couple random questions. When I reformat a hard drive, and I partition the drive, what does that mean exactly? In other words, Is that completely deleting any information stored on the drive? And what is FAT and NTFS and what are the differences between the two system file types? Just trying to familiarize myself with these terms. Thanks! Chris

Hi again Chris, I'm not chasing you….. honest! It just so happens that when I've logged in to browse, you topics come to my attention. I do hope that you start getting other and additional information from others of our excellent staff. In the meantime, here goes…. FAT and NTFS These are "file systems" (methods of listing data, much like the "table of contents and index of a book) by which the operating system and machine can store information and later be able to find it in the sections (chapters) of your Hard Drive. FAT is an "older" system. It used to be thought of as "faster but less secure than NTFS" FAT is compatible for installation of Win98 2nd Ed., WinME, and the 16 bit version of FAT was used for Win98 and Win95 NTFS is a "newer" system. It definitely has better security features and hardly ever is cited as being any slower any more. XP can use either system, but NTFS is definitely the system to chose, in my opinion. Until you get into some serious study, it is probably not worthwhile to expand on the actual mechanism of file storage and indexing differences of the two systems. It used to be that many XP machines were running on FAT systems, because they had been "upgraded" from WinME or Win98 without formatting the Hard Drive. It works (ed) but is not the best recommendation these days. Use NTFS As to Formatting. No. Formatting does not "completely" wipe out any previously stored files and information on the hard drive. Instead, it does a "pretty good" job of erasing the table-of-contents and index kinds of information. Without the index, a Windows operating system has no easy means for recognizing what portions of the Hard Drive may have had data saved, and therefore Windows pretty much treats a formatted HD as if it were "empty". However, with the use of special file-retrieval software, the actual data can be "seen" and even recovered and assigned new indexing so that Windows will again "see" the saved data. In fact, even "deleting" files with the ordinary Windows system tools does not actually "remove" the data. It only erases the indexing references to where the data can be found. Again, special file-retrieval software may be able to scan and identify data or fragments of data, sufficient to reconstruct a document or picture or tune or video or the like. It is only after a section of the hard drive has had new information over-written onto it, that the original data starts getting hard to retrieve. So what? For the ordinary user, Formatting the hard drive is sufficient to restore a hard drive to a condition that the Windows operating system can use it as if it is a fresh clean hard drive. If there is data, documents, email, web activity, pictures, tunes, video, and other files that the owner wishes to secure against ever being discovered, then further treatment with specialized applications can "try" to erase the data, and in most cases can do a fairly good job, but an owner should work under the assumption that if information or data have ever been saved to Hard Drive, then it can, with sufficient effort, be retrieved whether you like it or not. As to Partitioning…. A single physical Hard Drive can be divided into two or more logical drive sections such that Windows treats these "partitions" labeled as Drive E, F, G, H. etc as if they were separate Hard Drives. It can be useful to have a single Hard Drive partitioned into multiple logically labeled drives. It is relatively common for folks to use a C:\ partition to install the Windows operating system. And then to have a D:\ partition logically labeled to use for Data, documents, tunes, media etc. savings And then to have an E:\ partition logically labeled to use for installation of application software. Having the C:\ drive separate from all others can in some cases assist if the Windows operating system gets corrupted or infected. The owner can then work on and clean up the C:\ partition without disturbing data or other installed applications. I wonder if I am answering your questions. I'll stop for now. You may get other/better descriptions from other techs. Or you might now have some more specific questions to guide the discussion to the specifics that you wish to discover. Best Regards, Doug

and the 16 bit version of FAT was used for Win98 and Win95

Actually, FAT was designed for floppy disks and came before DOS days and would not compete with any of the later file systems. FAT16 dominated DOS and early Windows through Win95. Fat32 came about with Win95SR2. So Win98, 98SE, and ME supported FAT32. In fact, Win98 defaulted to FAT32. At any rate, you want to use NTFS - it is much more robust and secure. Even if there were a speed hit, a good drive with a nice buffer, a decent amount of RAM, and properly manage Page File will negate that.

Doug is right that formatting does not really erase the previously stored data, but the space is marked as free, and prepared for data storage. However, as soon as the drive is used and data is stored again, any previously stored data will become increasing more difficult, even with the best forensic retrieval methods, to recover.

Praise be!!! for our precious Quinquagenarians! Thanks again, Digerati.

once again Doug, you have enlightened me! And there definitely will be more questions to come. Thanks again for your help.

though I would like to know a little more about partitioning??

OK Mordimier,

But first it's time for a little google research on your part.
Google the term: Partitioning hard drive

You will find a ton of good information.

Come on back when you have specific observations, questions, and application situations for your own system.

Doug

fat stands for "file allocation table" it is a table that basically reads like an address book of sectors on a hard disk, so that data can be written to and read from using its address space. Was quite wasteful of space as hard drives got larger so NTFS was introduced to compensate for increased disk size NTfs is file system based on NT, i think one on the best features of ntfs over fat left out in all post here is the size of a single file that ntfs can handle over fat ! much ,much bigger ,like 2gig