Formatting new drive in WinXP

[Wuzup101]

Alright, dropped in a new 80gb WDSE in my brothers aging T-Bird system. Anyway the system is running XP, but I don't have his CDs with me (they are at school with the rest of my software that I forgot). I went into Admin tools and drives and tried to format from there. And it seemed to be working alright but it's taking forever. I let it alone for like half an hour, and it only got up to 1 percent. Is this normal? At this rate it wont be done by the time I go back to school???

 

[mikecel79]

It shouldn't have taken that long. Did you do a quick format? Normally a quick format takes like 1-2 minutes tops.

 

[Gerbil333]

The long format takes a while. Not 30 minutes for 1%, but maybe 30-60 minutes for an entire hard drive. It depends on the hard drive.

Quick Format takes at max 30 seconds to a minute for me.

 

[Nothinman]

It shouldn't have taken that long. Did you do a quick format? Normally a quick format takes like 1-2 minutes tops.

But if he just bought the drive he should let the full format run to make sure the drive is good. Generally I like to run my drives with bonnie++ for 12-24hrs before I put real data on them, to ensure they're not going to die right away.

 

[Wuzup101]

Alright, I quit the format and then did it again. I was doing the regular format, and it took about 45 ish min. I just wasn't sure how long things take in windoes. 1% was outragiously long, so I figured something was wrong. I guess they take the same time (about) to format in windows as they would if you booted off the XP cd...

 

[corkyg]

In addition to the drive size, the CPU speed also is a big factor in a complete format.

 

[Nothinman]

In addition to the drive size, the CPU speed also is a big factor in a complete format.

Only in the most extreme cases, a full format performs a bad block test which just writes chunks of data the drive and reads it back to make sure it's still the same, the drive speed is way more limiting than the CPU.