A+ Hardware Service Technician: Computer Hardware, System Boards, and Storage Devices

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Preparing Your Hard Drive

The factory does a low level format on the hard drive prior to shipping it out which organizes the hard drive into tracks and sectors. It is possible for you to perform a low level format of a drive but highly not recommended. Low level formatting can damage a hard drive and make it unusable.

When you install a hard drive, there are several items you need to be aware of when setting it up. There are three settings on hard drives: Master/Slave/Cable Select. Master is used for the first hard drive, Slave for the second drive when you have two, and Cable Select goes in the order on the EIDE cable.

EIDE interfaces allow two drives per channel. Most EIDE controllers have a primary and secondary channel to allow for four total devices.

Before the installation of an operating system, you have to partition and format (high level format) the hard drive. When you partition a drive, you setup different virtual drives on the PC. Hard drives can have three primary partitions and 1 extended partition. Extended partitions can have up to 23 logical partitions. On most computers, you are able to setup a single partition if you wish. Commonly this becomes drive "C:" in Windows (A: and B: are typically reserved for floppy disk drives).

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