how long to format? (1 Viewer)

[MikeAlletto]

Q. How long does it take Windows 2000 install CD to format an 80GB ata133 HD in NTFS?
A. I don't know, its still running after 30 minutes or so :frowning:
time for a beer

 

[Derrick_Ellis]

Yep. It will take a while. Pop in a DVD.

 

[Rob Gillespie]

If you select 'quick format' is doesn't take long at all.

 

[MichaelPe]

Last week I bought a new 40GB drive, and spent hours trying to format it... it was stuck at the 0% mark for almost 10 hours! Tired of waiting, I rebooted the computer, erased the volume, recreated it, and reformatted. Surprisingly, it finally worked! In all, it took around 30 minutes to format it (NTFS).

 

[MikeAlletto]

The 80GB one took about an hour. But thats ok. I got what I think was a good deal. 80GB 7200RPM ata133 HD, 2MB cache, with a free promise technologies ata133 pci ide card for $149 (then take another 10 off because I had a best buy gift card with money left on it). They also had a 60GB 7200rpm ata100 HD for the same price without an ide card! Couldn't believe it.

 

[KyleS]

Yep Mike it can take some time to get HD's formatted especially when you do an unconditional format....... Waiting and waiting. You know it didnt help that you sat there and watched the screen.
KyleS

 

[Ryan Witt]

If you select 'quick format' is doesn't take long at all.

Ahhhh! Don't do that! If you are going to take the time to format your drive, I suggest a full format. The quick format seems to leave trash around the hard drive and may cause problems after you set up your OS.

What's an hour to you when you're (hopefully) going to get months, if not years out of the fresh install?

 

[Derrick_Ellis]

Plus, you can't do a quick format on a drive that has never been formatted before.

 

[Wayne Bundrick]

Ahhhh! Don't do that! If you are going to take the time to format your drive, I suggest a full format. The quick format seems to leave trash around the hard drive and may cause problems after you set up your OS.

I've never had that kind of problem with a quick format, but a wipedisk utility could clean things up after the OS is installed. The only problem with quick format is that it doesn't verify that all of the drive's sectors are good. With today's huge drives the OS takes up only a small part of the drive's capacity. I'll take the chance that no bad sectors will be encountered during the installation of the OS and do a full surface scan afterward.