Formatting with Windows 9X
Windows 9X provides several ways to
perform a logical format. You can use the fdisk and format utilities
on a Windows 9X Startup Disk to partition and format a hard disk
before installing Windows 9X. Once Windows 9X is installed, you can
perform a logical format by right-clicking a volume in My Computer or
Windows Explorer and choosing Format, or by using the command-line
format utility. Command-line format uses the syntax
format
<drive:>
/switches, where <drive:>
is the drive letter assigned to that volume, and the available
switches that pertain to hard disk formatting are as follows:
-
/v:<label> Specifies the volume label.
-
/q Specifies that format should perform a “quick” format, which reinitializes the filesystem but does not perform an actual format. Using this is a fast way to delete all data on a drive.
-
/c Tests clusters that are currently marked bad.
-
/s Copies system files to the disk being formatted, making it bootable.
Unlike the Windows NT command-line format utility, the Windows 9X utility does nothing that you can’t do using the graphical utilities, so there is little reason to use it. For flexibility, we prefer to use PartitionMagic to partition and format a drive before installing Windows 9X.