A good answer might be:

Yes.

Files and Hardware

As far as the hardware of a computer system is concerned, all files look alike. Each file is regarded by hardware as a collection of bytes. (Remember that a byte is 8 bits.)

The hardware makes no distinction between (say) image files and text files. Its all bytes to the hardware. What those bytes are being used for is up to the software.

You can think of a hard disk as being like a bookshelf with many books on it—novels, picture books, text books, note books... The bookshelf works the same for all books, since all books are fundamentally alike. Of course some readers specialize in some kinds of books, but that is a "software" distinction, not a property of the "storage hardware."

QUESTION 5:

The program Notepad uses text files but can make no sense of a MS Word file. Does this mean that the files are fundamentally different?