In the process of getting to know a computer, a novice user has to master many operations, from customizing the appearance of the desktop to installing the programs he needs. Sometimes a situation arises when the user needs to format a hard drive or USB flash drive.
The need for formatting usually arises in two cases: when installing the operating system on a new hard disk and when cleaning the disk from old or virus-infected files. The initial formatting of a new hard drive is done by the operating system itself when it is installed. If the user installs the OS on an already used disk, during installation he will have the opportunity to keep the existing formatting or select a new one. Windows XP and Windows 7 operating systems use NTFS formatting. This means that during formatting, the order of organization, naming and storage of files on the disk will be established in accordance with the principles of the NTFS system. Linux operating system uses ext2 and ext3 formatting. Formatting is a necessary operation that prepares a hard disk or USB flash drive for writing information. How to format? If you have multiple hard disks or a disk has multiple partitions, you can format any disk and partition other than the one on which the operating system is installed - it simply will not allow you to do this. To format, open: "Start - My Computer", select the drive you need and right-click on it. In the menu that appears, select "Format". In the window that opens, select the type of file system and formatting method. If "fast" formatting is selected, then only the file allocation tables are cleared, but the files themselves are not deleted. Something similar will happen if you rip out a page with a table of contents from a book - despite the absence of a table of contents, the text can still be read. Do not use quick format when installing the OS, especially if you are installing Windows XP after Windows 7. Remaining Windows 7 files may cause errors during the installation process. The same is true when cleaning a virus-infected disk - if you cannot remove viruses in another way, perform a full format. Sometimes it becomes necessary to reliably delete some information. Remember that even after a complete formatting, you can recover the overwhelming part of the information stored on the disk; for this, special recovery utilities are used. Therefore, to ensure the removal of information, special methods and programs are used that allow not only to delete information, but to write down instead of it and erase a random sequence of numbers several times. It is believed that for guaranteed erasure, it is necessary to apply up to seven cycles of writing-erasing information. You can format the disk and guarantee to erase the information in the Acronis Disk Director program. There are two main versions of it: one runs under Windows, the other runs from the installation disk. Otherwise, their capabilities are the same. With this program you can perform any operations with disks - split them, merge them, format them, assign drive letters.
