The process
of preparing any storage medium, especially a hard disk or a floppy disk,
for storing and retrieving data is called formatting. Formatting organises
a disk into logical areas called tracks, sectors and clusters along which
data is stored. A hard disk or floppy disk is needed to format before use.
Whenever a hard disk or floppy disk is formatted, it divides the disk into
concentric circles called tracks. Data is stored along these concentric
tracks. Each track is divided into smaller segments, areas within each
circle called sectors. Each sector is further dividend into number of smaller
areas called clusters. Cluster represents the smallest addressable unit
of storage that can read or written to. ‘File Allocation Table’
(FAT) allocates space on disk for storing files in the form of clusters
and also keeps tracks of associated files and clusters. FAT cannot support
hard disk greater than 2 GB in size. ‘DOS’ and all different
versions of ‘Windows’ use FAT for allocating space for data
storage. ‘FAT 32’ is an enhanced version of FAT that comes
with ‘Windows 95 OSR 2’ and ‘Windows 98’. FAT 32
stores data more efficiently as compared to FAT, thus providing with more
disk space. FAT 32 also supports hard disks grater than 2 GB.
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