Disk formatting

hard disk or other storage medium for use by an operating system or a user.

Formatting essentially creates the file system structure that the operating system requires for data to be stored on the medium, and may also write other information to the storage medium, such as a boot sector.

There are many different file systems, such as FAT, FAT32, ext2, ext3, UFS and the like.

Disks can be formatted with two or more filesystems, divided into logical sections: this is known as partitioning.

Formatting destroys all data when it is initiated. For this reason, before any disk formatting should be taken place, backups of vital data should be taken. However, the advantage of this is that a computer system running on a severely corrupted operating system or filesystem can be reverted to a fresh, uninitialized state by reformatting the disk.

Of course, as with regular deletion of files, data may be recoverable, unless they're securely shredded beforehand.