Disk Drive
Disk Drive
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How many times can you format your hard disk drive?
Will formating to much hurt your hard drive? And I know everything is wiped clean but what really happens to all the stuff that was on my disk drive?
You can format any number of times; it does not damage your disk any more than normal usage. Formatting a hard disk simply creates a file system on the hard disk and maps logical disk sectors with physical disk sectors. When a hard disk is first manufactured, it consists of raw sectors that CAN hold data, it's just that no ordinary computer will know how to access that data because there is no Master File Table (MFT) on the disk telling the computer where one file ends and another begins, or where the data from a particular file is stored. To be usable, a hard disk must be "formatted" with a particular file system. FAT (File Allocation Table) and all it's more modern iterations (FAT16, FAT32) are simple file systems with their beginnings in the late '70s. Because of the way they address sectors, they cannot manage modern large hard disk volumes. NTFS is a newer file system that is much more robust and can manage larger volumes. There are many other file systems; these are just the two most common examples. With either of these (and most other) file systems, a Master File Table is created during formatting. It can be thought of as an "index" of which sectors to ask for when requesting a particular file. The MFT is separate from your files; you cannot "see" the MFT in Windows Explorer which is why copying every last file in Windows Explorer will not create a 1:1 clone of the hard drive. To "clone" a hard disk you need a program that can copy the MFT (and the MBR--Master Boot Record--if it is a bootable (system) hard disk). Formatting does one of three things:
1. Quick format--this erases the MFT and MBR only and does not check the disk for bad sectors. Your data actually remains untouched at the sectors it was originally written at, which is why data recovery software is able to recover files perfectly most of the time. The same thing happens when you delete a file (even from the Recycle Bin), it's data remains, it's entry is simply erased from the MFT and the operating system sees all the space occupied by the file as usable free space. Therefore, using the hard drive for any length of time will undoubtedly result in the data being overwritten, since the disk controller looks for the first available blocks of free space when it writes new files to the disk. As long as you don't use your hard drive after formatting, you should be able to recover most if not all of the data from it.
2. Full format--This is exactly the same as a quick format except that it also checks the disk for "bad sectors" (sectors that have been damaged by a power surge or physical damage of some kind), and if it finds any it reallocates them to an extra sector that is held in "reserve". On all HDDs there are reserve sectors for just that purpose (but not as many as you think--you aren't losing any significant amount of space and NO THAT IS NOT WHY HDDs ARE MARKETED AT A HIGHER CAPACITY THAN THEY ACTUALLY ARE. The only reason you couldn't recover data just as easily from a fully formatted disk as from a quickly formatted disk is if that file you are trying to recover was located on a bad/failing sector already.
3. Low-level format--This blanks the MBR, MFT and the actual file headers of every file. This will cause your files to be difficult to recover to a novice unless they know the original filename.
Formatting DOES erase everything, to the novice. Your data, however, is generally FULLY recoverable so if you want to truly erase it; unless you know how to properly erase data from a hard drive (multiple rewrite patterns; there are programs that do this for you) you should physically destroy the hard disk, and don't stop till all the platters are in pieces.
