What actually happens when you format?

[foolishone]

When you choose to do a format, what does the drive do. If you were shrunken down and placed in a hard drive, what would you see? How does the drive change from before and after the format, besides empty?

^fo

[thefultonhow]

Originally Posted by foolishone When you choose to do a format, what does the drive do. If you were shrunken down and placed in a hard drive, what would you see? How does the drive change from before and after the format, besides empty? ^fo

Believe it or not, unless you do a low-level format, all that really happens is that the file allocation table is overwritten. The files stay on the drive, but there is no way to access them unless you scan the whole drive in raw mode. That's how a lot of data-recovery places get files back when the drive has been reformatted.

[doubledragon5]

You can use a program that will make it hard for someone to recover information you erase on the HD. Wipedrv is the program I have, I used it once when my system was infected with all kinds of viruses and trojans, it took 14 hrs to do a 3x wipe...

[edfair]

It depends on what kind of operating system you have and what kind of drive you are asking about.

In the old days, with old operating systems, on old drives you would be able to watch the heads step to each cylinder as they wrote new address and data information on the tracks and when finished step backwards while they were verifying the sectors and then dance around writing linking information. And if the drive was old enough you could watch what the head mechanism did as the drive came to speed.

You wouldn't be able to see anything different. A full one doesn't look any different that an empty one.