The well-known FORMAT command is used, of course, to format hard disks and floppy
disks. Many people don't realize that this command functions quite differently for hard
disks and floppy disks. There are two steps to formatting:
low-level formatting and high-level formatting. For floppy disks, FORMAT does both
low-level formatting and high-level formatting. For hard disks, it only does high-level
formatting, because modern hard disks are low-level formatted at the factory.
There are many different parameters that the FORMAT command will use; they can be seen
by typing "FORMAT /?" at a DOS command line. Most of these commands are used for
specifying different formatting options for different types
of floppy disks. An important parameter is the "/S" flag, which tells FORMAT
to make the volume it is formatting bootable. This is done by creating the proper disk
structures for booting, and copying the operating system files to the root directory of
the new volume.
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