Main Page | See live article | Alphabetical index Disk formatting is the process of preparing a 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. There are many different file systems, such as FAT, ext2, 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. This article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by fixing it. This article is from Wikipedia. All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.