TechTalk: Hard Drives Page 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

Formatting the Drive The new hard drive has to be formatted before any files can be written to it. If the computer is going to have Windows 95, 98, or Millenium, boot with a DOS disk and format the drive with FDISK, a powerful DOS program. Windows 9x use the File Allocation Table—or FAT32—system. FAT32 is a legacy format that can be read by DOS. FAT is extremely vulnerable to Viruses! Windows NT, 2000, XP and Vista, on the other hand, can be formatted with the NT File System—NTFS. If the new drive is going to have the NT, 2000 or XP operating system, the Windows setup program will format the drive. Advantages to the NT file system NTFS stores multiple copies of the Master File Table-so there is no single point of failure if the table is damaged. Files stored on NTFS have security. A Windows XP workstation running on FAT32 does not have this option.