| There are three steps involved in
preparing a new drive. Consult the table below to determine
which of the three steps you may have to carry out.
- Low Level Formatting (LLF)
- Partitioning
- High Level Formatting (HLF)
| Task |
LLF |
Partitioning |
HLF |
| New drive |
N * |
Y |
Y |
| Partitioning existing
drive |
N |
Y |
Y |
| Preparing for a new
operating system |
N |
N ** |
Y*** |
* On modern IDE drives this step is
almost always obsolete. On older drives this step may
be required if your drive is not pre-formatted at the
factory or you need to repair surface errors.
** You may already have a partitioned
drive which is suitable, however if you are upgrading
from Win9x to NT, 2000 or XP, you may want to format
an NTFS
partition for use by these operating systems.
*** If you intend to format an NTFS
partition you should skip to the final section of this
article 'Preparing An NTFS Volume'
which describes how to prepare a drive with an NTFS
file system.
|
Preparing a Hard Drive