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Format a NTFS hard drive in 10.3 - NOT
Authored by: silicontrip on Apr 21, '05 09:49:30PM

I agree with Macslut.

The title appears to imply creation of an NTFS, well that's what I assumed. Reading the paragraph explains what is actually happening.

Personally I would use the term "Erase" rather than "Format."

This reminds me of the old days of floppy disks where you could format a disk then initialize a filesystem. Most people assumed that they were the one thing. Erasing the disk first and then creating the filesystem are two seperate steps.
Nowadays you don't need to low level format IDE disks.

Being a unix person I would erase a disk using DD

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/diskX

of course you still have to eject the disk before doing this.

you could also use /dev/random as the source device, to make the data even more confusing but I have found that /dev/random only produces 6 meg per second.

Gotta love unix as there is always more than one way to do it!!!



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Definition from: man diskutil
Authored by: hamarkus on Jul 28, '06 05:33:27AM

From man diskutil:
reformat device
Reformat an existing device in the same name and format.

I think this makes it obvious what reformat means. It precisely means the opposite of what some people were claiming (format a disk in a different format). By deduction, 'Format an (NTFS, HFS, UFS,...) disk' simply means the disk is being formatted, it does not specify in which format it is going to be formatted. If that information is important simply use the short and very convenient word 'as', as in ''format [a disk] as NTSF'.



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