(2) The thin metal platters that make up a hard drive are covered with a special magnetic coating that enables the data to be recorded onto one or both sides of the platter. Hard drive manufacturers prepare the disks to hold data through a process called lowlevel formatting. In this process, concentric circles, each called a track, and pie-shaped wedges, each called a sector, are created in the magnetized surface of each platter, setting up a gridlike pattern that identifies file locations on the hard drive