Format partitions?

[tonyvdb]

So Ive read somewhere but dont remember where that a person should NOT format partitions using the full format option other than the System partition, using Quick format instead. Is this correct?

And what difference does it make to have "international mode" selected.

[Aegis]

The INTERNATIONAL option formats disks using the international versions of the file systems. International file systems handle upper and lower letter case conversions of international characters in file names. The NOINTERNATIONAL option forces the non-international file system on devices for which International mode is the default. The default setting for floppy disks and PCMCIA cards is NOINTERNATIONAL and for hard drive partitions is INTERNATIONAL. Disks created with INTERNATIONAL mode set are not compatible with Amiga system software releases prior to 2.04.

Re: full-fat formatting - I think it used to be frowned upon with some (SCSI?) drives as it could mess up the drive geometry - I doubt it's an issue on modern IDE/SATA drives - not much point unless you enjoy watching progress bars though

[Oldsmobile_Mike]

Re: full-fat formatting - I think it used to be frowned upon with some (SCSI?) drives as it could mess up the drive geometry - I doubt it's an issue on modern IDE/SATA drives - not much point unless you enjoy watching progress bars though

+1.  I think modern drives just ignore the command, anyway.

International Mode allows the directory to handle filenames with international characters (i.e. those not found in English, such as ä and ê.)

More info than you'd ever care to know, right here:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_Fast_File_System


Personally I use PFS and wouldn't go back to FFS unless I had to (for example, if I was using a hard disk controller that didn't support PFS).  But changing your file system at this point is going to be a whole other can of worms you might not want to open, unless you want to start doing a lot more research on the subject.  

[danbeaver]

The hard drive is fully preformatted by the factory, so a basic raw format is not needed, and risky if you have the wrong geometry -- this is only an option in early versions of the Hard Disk Tool.  As to a partition format that assigns the File Allocation Table, you CAN use the extremely slow full format, but it is not needed to overlay the FAT (vide supra), and a quick format should suffice unless you loved loading tapes in your C64 or can wait several hours while you do something like rebuild the engine in an Old's 442.

[Oldsmobile_Mike]

while you do something like rebuild the engine in an Old's 442.

Been there, done that!  

[AndyFC]

From memory, I believe the advice nineties (when I got an HD for my 1200) was not to use Low Level format on IDE. Maybe this is what you're thinking of?

[Thomas]

So Ive read somewhere but dont remember where that a person should NOT format partitions using the full format option other than the System partition, using Quick format instead. Is this correct?

1. full format does nothing useful to the drive. There is no way for an application program to format a SCSI or IDE harddrive. Instead of format the program does just write. And write and write and write and write and write for a very long time and with no use at all.

Quick format does the important work: it initialises the file system

2. the format programs which come with Workbench up to and including (I think) version 3.5 are not able to format anything outside the first 4 GB of the harddrive. If your harddrive is bigger than 4 GB and you try to full-format a partition which resides outside the first 4 GB what happens instead is that areas of other partitions inside the first 4 GB are overwritten. The data which was there before is destroyed. So it is very dangerous to use full-format on harddrives bigger than 4 GB.

Because it is of no use anyway, the suggestion to avoid full format on everything except floppy disks is always valid. Quick format is just that: quick and sufficient.




And there is no FAT in the Amiga file system.

[tonyvdb]

Thanks for the great clarification