In
Ted Zieglar said:
I buy my hard drives in stores. They are already low level
formatted,
Yes, but you're using these terms in an unusual highly personal
way. The term "formatted," used by itself, never refers to
low-level formatting.
and as such do not need to be reformatted before installing XP.
All drives need to be partitioned and then each partition needs
to be formatted (remember that plain "formatting" does not refer
to low-level formatting) before use. What's apparently confusing
you here is that a normal Windows XP clean installation both
partitions and formats as part of that installation. In contrast,
in MS-DOS and Windows 9X, you did these as separate steps before
starting the operating system installation. And even with Windows
XP, you still can do them as separate steps, and sometimes you
*have* to do it that way; for example if you want to have a FAT32
partition larger than 32GB, Windows XP won't create it and your
only choice is to first manually partition that way and then
format it.
If I
was to purchase a second hand drive - something I personally do
not
do - I would perform a low level format before installing the
OS.
No, you can *not* do this. A number of years ago, it was possible
to low-level format drives yourself, but on today's modern drives
it's strictly a factory procedure. Any attempt to do this
yourself would result in ruining the drive.
What you *can* do yourself is zero-fill the tracks of the drive.
Unfortunately some people refer to this as low-level formatting,
but it is not that at all.
Returning to the subject of formatting (not low-level formatting)
it's actually partitions, not drives, that have to be formatted;
each partition that's created on the drive has to be formatted
separately. Neither partitioning nor formatting is normally done
before you buy the drive because the manufacturer doesn't know
what operating system you're going to use it with, how many
partitions you want, what size they should be, nor what file
system they should use.
