Seagate manual ST9144 Family Installation Guide, Rev. B

4 ST9144 Family Installation Guide, Rev. B

geometry. CMOS configuration is system-dependent and is usually accomplished through a utility such as SETUP.

∙Low-level formatting. Seagate AT interface drives are low- level formatted at the factory and do not need low-level format- ting.

Caution. If an installed drive is low-level formatted, all user data will be lost. Seagate Technology, Inc. assumes no liability for lost user data.

∙Partitioning. A drive can be subdivided into partitions that behave as individual drives within the system. Earlier versions of DOS (before version 4.0) have a limitation on maximum drive capacity and consequently require higher capacity drives to be divided into smaller partitions. For DOS users, each partition is assigned a different letter, for example, C: and D: for a drive with two partitions.

Use the DOS FDISK utility to partition the drive. After the drive has been defined in CMOS, you must boot the system to the floppy drive with a bootable DOS diskette. Then run the FDISK utility to partition the drive. Refer to your DOS manual for using FDISK. Use DOS 3.3 or higher.

∙High-level formatting. The last part of the installation proce- dure is high-level formatting the drive. High-level formatting verifies the information written by the low-level format and establishes drive access information used by the system. High-level formatting in DOS creates the File Allocation Table (FAT) used by DOS for drive access. The high-level format is initiated by the FORMAT command. Refer to your DOS manual for instructions on using the FORMAT command.