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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