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PC Hardware in a Nutshell, 3rd Edition
book

PC Hardware in a Nutshell, 3rd Edition

by Robert Bruce Thompson, Barbara Fritchman Thompson
July 2003
Beginner to intermediate content levelBeginner to intermediate
874 pages
38h 13m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from PC Hardware in a Nutshell, 3rd Edition

Formatting with Windows 2000/XP

Windows 2000/XP provides several methods to perform a logical format. During Setup, Windows 2000/XP allows you to format existing or newly created volumes as either FAT or NTFS. Other than using a third-party utility such as PartitionMagic, this is the only method available to format an NTFS volume before Windows 2000/XP has been installed. The format process invoked during Setup is not very flexible, so we prefer to use PartitionMagic to create and format partitions before installing Windows 2000/XP.

Once a system is bootable under Windows 2000/XP, you can also perform a logical format on a disk by using the graphical Disk Management utility (Computer Management Storage Disk Management), by right-clicking a volume in My Computer or Windows Explorer and choosing Format, or by using the command-line format utility. The first two methods allow you to select all format options, but limit your choice of allocation unit (cluster) size. Command- line format provides complete flexibility in choosing cluster size, and 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:

/fs:<file-system>

Where <file-system> specifies the type of the filesystem to be used, and may be FAT or NTFS.

/v:<label>

Specifies the volume label.

/q

Specifies that format should perform a “quick” format, which reinitializes the filesystem but does not perform ...

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 059600513XErrata Page