Reformatting To begin formatting your drive, run the new !HForm application from the Utilities folder on your hard disc. If you are reformatting your primary drive, it is a good idea to copy !HForm onto a floppy disc and run it from there, as once the disc is re- formatted, you might not easily be able to get at !HForm should you need it. HForm is only used to reformat IDE hard drives connected to the internal IDE interface in your computer, i.e any disc which shows the letters ADFS: in its title bar when you access it, and which isn't a floppy disc eg. ADFS::HardDisc4.$ If you have SCSI hard drives or a third party IDE Interface you will need to contact the supplier to obtain an updated formatter to give you the new RISC OS 4 disc format on those drives. Once you run HForm the screen will change to single tasking display. You will be prompted to specify which drive number you are formatting: 4 to 7. Your main drive is normally 4, your second hard disc is normally 5 etc. The software will give you details of the make and model of the selected drive. If you have selected the wrong drive, or want to quit the program at any point just press the ESCAPE (Esc) key to cancel the program and return to the desktop. HForm will ask you a variety of technical questions, and provide you with default values for each. With modem drives, the defaults are normally correct, provided that you wish to use all the available space on the disc. There may be occasions (for example, installing a Unix variant alongside RISC OS) when you don't want to use all the space on the disc, but these are rare, and you should consult the appropriate documentation for more information. Details of the questions follow... HForm Questions After the disc has been identified, if it has been formatted already, you will be asked: Do you wish to retain this shape? We recommend entering N and pressing return so that you have the opportunity to set things correctly. You will then be shown a list of "known" drives. It is unlikely that you will be formatting one of these drives, so press: 9 HForm will now ask you to confirm various details about your drive. Default suggestions will be made based on the information read from the drive: Sectors per track: Heads: Cylinders: Drive Parameter init flag: Drive LBA flag: Parking Cylinder: Unless you have a particular reason (eg. you are installing Linux alongside RISC OS) why you don't want to use all the available space, just press Return to accept the suggested value. The one parameter you can always calculate for yourself is the Parking Cylinder which should be one less than the number of Cylinders. You will now be asked questions related to marking out bad sectors on the disc. It is extremely unlikely that this will be necessary. Press A to move on without altering the Defect List. When asked if you wish to Format or just Initialise the disc, press I to initialise. This may seem strange, but the Format option will do an extremely lengthy "Low Level Format" which is rarely needed. The same applies to the next question (soak test), so enter N for None, unless you have plenty of spare time! Important Questions The next three questions are important, and you may want to change from the default values. Firstly, if you ever plan to boot from the drive being formatted, press Y when asked if you wish to make the disc bootable. There is no harm in having more than one bootable disc in your computer, so there is very little reason not to make the disc bootable. The next question: Do you wish to use Long Filenames is the critical one. This selects whether the disc uses the old or new format. If you've come this far, the chances are that you will want to press Y to enable long filenames. The final question is the size of the Large File Allocation Unit (LFAU). In general, you will want to accept the default value shown. The LFAU is the amount of space which even the smallest file will take on your disc. The higher the value, the more wasted space if you have lots of little files. You may find performance is very slightly better with larger LFAUs, although improved technology in RISC OS 4 will make any such performance benefit negligible. As a rule of thumb, for drives up to about 7 or 8 Gb in size you should use a 1024 LFAU. Note that for an 8Gb drive, your computer will use about 1Mb to cache the map with this size LFAU. If this is a problem, you may wish to increase the size of the LFAU to 2048 which will halve the cache memory requirement. It is worth saying that even by entering 2048 (ie. double the suggested value) you will still see considerably more free space when your data is copied over from an old format disc. For example, transferring 1.35Gb of data from a 1.6Gb drive (well over half of which was consumed by a PC partition and two 100+Mb Zip archives, which would not benefit from the smaller LFAU) onto a 4.2Gb drive with a 2048 LFAU resulted in a saving of over 100Mb of disc space! Finally, you will be asked to confirm the whole thing. Do so now. Depending on the size of the drive it will take a few seconds beforea list of the parameters being written to the drive is printed out. Transferring Data from one drive to another Before you begin transferring data, we strongly recommend shutting down your machine and restarting by selecting Shutdown from the task menu on the RISC OS 4 logo on the icon bar. Once your machine has restarted, you can now begin the process of transferring data onto the new drive. The big hint here is not to try and move the data from one drive to another, but copy it instead. Why is this? If for any reason something goes wrong whilst transferring the data (eg. power failure or Act of God) you will still have a complete, safe, usable copy on your source disc. Secondly, if for any reason something dislikes being transferred (eg, an application which needed uninstalling, or one which doesn't like the new format disc for some obscure reason), you have a safe working copy. When you are happy that all is working correctly from the new disc, you can either re-format or wipe the data off the backup disc, although there is much to be said for keeping that backup safe in case of accident.