Why Reformat?
To partition your disk, you must reformat it. To format a disk means to prepare it for use; to reformat a disk means to wipe everything off the disk and prepare it for a fresh new use. There’s no way to partition a disk without reformatting it first.
Once you have partitions, you can erase individual partitions without affecting the data on other volumes. For instance, while I was in the process of working with beta versions of Mac OS X and upgrading them constantly, it worked best to reformat just the one partition I had set aside for Mac OS X.
Sometimes you might need to reformat a disk because things get so screwy on your computer that, as a last resort, you totally reformat and start over from scratch. For instance, on a new ...
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