To help reinforce the concepts presented in this section. To maximize your learning, please visit these Web sites and review their content Key terms: FAT, FORMAT, root, sector, sector, serial number Thinking: Why would you want to format a storage device other than the default 512 bytes per secotr? If you are using a system primarily for video editing, a sector size of 4096 bytes may be a better fit to increase I/O speeds. This option will allow you to change how large the sectors are to be set. As new data is added to the device, existing sectors are rewritten with new data. This option resets the FAT as empty and leaves the sectors alone. If a label is not given, a random name/number is generated. This option will allow you to give a meaningful name to a storage device. Data previously written to the media will not be altered by the command. With this option the command will not do the 2nd and 3rd step, above. FORMAT always writes a BIOS Parameter Block to the first sector, with or without the /S option.Īnother option ( /Q) allows for what Microsoft calls 'Quick Format'. When this option is included, bootstrap code is written to the first sector of the volume (and possibly elsewhere as well). Optionally, (by adding /S, for 'system') it can also install a volume boot record.

Format then checks each cluster to see if it is good or bad and marks it in the FAT.

The root directory is cleared out by changing any values found to 0x00.

The FAT entries are cleared by changing them to 0x00.

It will not perform this function on optical media.

The command will perform the following actions by default on a floppy drive, hard drive, solid-states (USB), or other magnetic medium. A unique serial number will be created for storage device after formatting.įormat is a command-line utility included in Microsoft DOS, IBM OS/2 and Microsoft Windows operating systems to produce disk formatting. This command can erase everything on the storage device. In most cases, this should only be used on floppy drives or other removable media. The FORMAT command formats a disk with FAT and sectors. Learning objective: Explain the purpose of the FORMAT command Next > FORMAT Command (External) - Formats a disk

Top 10 MS-DOS Commands Top 10 MS-DOS Commands

Floppy disk format utility dos