Mount- and unmount a volume and a formatting question

tfwul · 06 May 2018

A while back I mounted a partition as a folder to a drive (disk managment)
All fine.

I have a question regarding formatting.

I would like to format the parent drive (the drive to which the partition is mounted as a NTFS folder)

Q: what happens when I format that drive?
IF.. at all possible of course considering a mounted folder.

or
should I first UNmount the folder, then format, and mount the drive again?

And.. last but not least, if the drive is unmounted, will it then still contain the data stored on it, or will this action result in loss of data?
(maybe the data is lost because the partition will get a new drive letter?)
Disk Management->Change drive letter and paths->Removing the drive results in a warning

"
Users will no longer be able to access files by using this path.
Are you sure that you want to remove this drive path?
"

Thanks!

slicendice · 07 May 2018

I'm not quite sure what your real question is here...

There is no such thing as a parent or child drive. You simply have a drive and it can contain one or more partitions. Each partition can be of different size and have different filesystems. When you format a partition, the file system file table (the links to the actual file data) will be reset/deleted.

A mount point is just a link to a partition or a folder on a partition. If you remove that folder or partition, the mount point does not exist anymore.

Conclusion:
If you format a partition, ALL it's data will be lost, no matter how you try to access it. But if you remove (correct term here is Un-assign) the drive letter, the data will still exist, and you can access it again, by assigning it a new or the same drive letter.