Red Hat ENTERPRISE LINUX AS 2.1 Installation Manual page 180

180 Appendix F:An Introduction to Disk Partitions
Figure F–1 An Unused Disk Drive
Not much to look at, is it? But if we are talking about disk drives on a basic level, it will do. Say
that we would like to store some data on this drive. As things stand now, it will not work. There is
something we need to do first...
F.1.1 It is Not What You Write, it is How You Write It
Experienced computer users probably got this one on the first try. We need to format the drive. For-
matting (usually known as "making a filesystem") writes information to the drive, creating order out
of the empty space in an unformatted drive.