> DOS / Windows refers to the partitioning of a drive as "formatting"

In my experience, for what it's worth, "formatting" in the Microsoft
world has always referred to making the filesystem, not partitioning.
As in "Once you've done this it's safe to reformat your D partition".
(Except for floppies, of course, where it refers to doing a reformat
and _then_ making a filesystem.)

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