Formatting is to prepare a storage medium such as a hard drive or flash drive to be recognized, read or written by computer. Formatting a disk involves testing the disk and writing a new file system onto the disk.
When you format a disk, the operating system erases all book keeping information on the disk, tests the disk to make sure all sectors are reliable, marks bad sectors (that is, those that are scratched), and creates internal address tables that will used later to locate information.
Formatting has low- level and high-level. Low-level or physical formatting sets certain properties of the disk such as the interleave factor, and determines what type of disk controller can access the disk (e.g., RLL or MFM) and writes all necessary stored data to enable the storage device to read the media. Almost all hard disks that you purchase have already had a low-level formatting, so it is unnecessary to perform a low-level formatting by yourself unless you want to change the interleave factor or make the disk accessible by a different type of disk controller, as low-level formatting will erase all data on the disk.
High-level or logical formatting writes data used by the operating system, such as allocation information and directories onto media which has already been physically formatted.
Most users only perform high-level formatting such as accidentally formatting a disk.
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