Before starting Hadoop in either pseudo-distributed or fully distributed mode for the first <br />time, we need to format the HDFS filesystem that it will use. <br /> <br />This is not a very exciting output because the step is only an enabler for our future use <br />of HDFS. However, it does help us think of HDFS as a filesystem; just like any new storage <br />device on any operating system, we need to format the device before we can use it. The <br />same is true for HDFS; initially there is a default location for the filesystem data but no <br />actual data for the equivalents of filesystem indexes.
