question: when you are preparing a new hard drive for your computer, a common question that comes up is whether you partition a hard drive first or do you format the hard drive first to install the operating system (OS)

to partition a drive means to divide the capacity of a drive into smaller, logical portions that are individually usable and configuratble. let me give you an example, if you have a 5GB drive, you can divide it into two 2.5GB partitions.

to format a drive means the type of file system you want to format that partition with. some formats are:

FAT
FAT32
NTSF (used by windows)
ext3,ext4 (used by Linux)
HFS+ (used by OS X)


the answer is very simple, you partition the drive first and then you format. so there, i hope i was able to answer your question

short and simple. what else do you want to know?