Reformatting partitioned drives

Question: You recently talked about reformatting a hard drive. Would the DOS command FORMAT C: /S work if you have a partitioned drive? My C drive is three big partitioned drives. So if I type FORMAT C: /S would that just format C and leave the other drives alone? –Blair

Answer: That’s right. “Format C: would format the logical drive, not the physical drive,” explained Jim Hendy, a systems engineer with KHO & Associates in Vancouver.

“This user appears to have one large drive broken into three partitions. Each partition is assigned a drive letter C:, D:, and E:. Formatting only operates on one logical drive at a time so the remaining two drives will be fine.”