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A block, a contiguous number of bytes, is the minimum unit of storage that is read from and written to a disk by a disk driver.The earliest disk drives had fixed block sizes (e.g. the IBM 350 disk storage unit (of the late 1950s) block size was 100 six-bit characters) but starting with the 1301 [8] IBM marketed subsystems that featured variable block sizes: a particular track could have blocks ...
In computing, format is a command-line utility that carries out disk formatting. It is a component of various operating systems , including 86-DOS , MS-DOS , IBM PC DOS and OS/2 , Microsoft Windows and ReactOS .
In 2010, hard-disk manufacturers introduced drives with 4,096‑byte sectors (Advanced Format). [3] For compatibility with legacy hardware and software, those drives include an emulation technology ( 512e ) that presents 512‑byte sectors to the entity accessing the hard drive, despite their underlying 4,096‑byte physical sectors. [ 4 ]
All Windows operating systems from Windows 95 onwards can be located on (almost) any partition, but the boot files (io.sys, bootmgr, ntldr, etc.) must reside on a primary partition. However, other factors, such as a PC's BIOS (see Boot sequence on standard PC ) may also impose specific requirements as to which partition must contain the primary OS.
Formerly, on disks formatted using the master boot record (MBR) partition layout, certain software components used hidden sectors of the disk for data storage purposes. For example, the Logical Disk Manager (LDM), on dynamic disks, stores metadata in a 1 MB area at the end of the disk which is not allocated to any partition.
MS-DOS/PC DOS versions 4.0 and earlier assign letters to all of the floppy drives before considering hard drives, so a system with four floppy drives would call the first hard drive E:. Starting with DOS 5.0, the system ensures that drive C: is always a hard disk, even if the system has more than two physical floppy drives.
The translation of the native 4096, 4112, 4160, or 4224-byte physical format (with 0, 8, 64, or 128-byte Data Integrity Fields) to a virtual 512, 520 or 528-byte increment is transparent to the entity accessing the hard disk drive. Read and write commands are issued to Advanced Format drives in the same format as legacy drives.
They are typically used as the hard disk of a virtual machine, are built into modern versions of Windows, and are the native file format for Microsoft's hypervisor (virtual machine system), Hyper-V. The format was created by Connectix for their Virtual PC product, known as Microsoft Virtual PC since Microsoft acquired Connectix in 2003. VHDX ...