Top-poster Jeff Richards wrote:

There is no guarantee that a drive formatted in one machine will be
recognised as validly formatted when installed in another machine,

What are you smoking?

The *only* problem I've ever seen regarding formatting and subsequent OS
installation was when I created a FAT-32 partition to install XP on
using OnTrack's Disk Manager and it gave a choice for OS installation
and I didn't think it mattered so I chose Windows-ME and the install
continuously failed until I re-partitioned using the "XP" choice.

and that is especially true if the machines are very different,
eg a laptop and a desktop.

Bull crap.

If you take any machine, attach a hard drive to it, boot DOS with a
win-98 floppy containing fdisk and format, and then partition, format
and sys the hard drive, that drive will have a logical structure that
will be no different than if it was partitioned and formatted on any
other system and it will boot into dos when connected to any other
system.

This assumes that the bios is compatible with the size of the drive, and
that the user hasn't entered any crazy-ass head and sector information
in the cmos setup. If the drive is less than 32 gb, then it's a
non-issue. If either system motherboard is less than 6 years old, then
it's a non-issue.