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Sometimes, data present in the physical drives (Internal/External Hard disk, Pen Drive, etc.) gets lost, deleted and formatted due to circumstances like virus attack, accidental deletion or accidental use of SHIFT+DELETE. Various colloquialisms exist for this process, such as 'wipe and reload', 'nuke and pave', 'reimage', etc. Rather than fixing an installation suffering from malfunction or security compromise, it may be necessary to simply reformat everything and start from scratch. Reformatting often carries the implication that the operating system and all other software will be reinstalled after the format is complete. This is a fast operation, and is sometimes referred to as quick formatting. High-level formatting is the process of setting up an empty file system on a disk partition or logical volume and, for PCs, installing a boot sector. Disk formatting is the process of preparing a data storage device such as a hard disk drive, solid-state drive, floppy disk or USB flash drive for initial use.
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