OT? Question about low and high level formatting...

[slugg]

I dont know if this is a little off topic but...

While I was installing windows to my friend's PC, the power went out at his house. This was right after it was done doing a low level format ("slow" format). Since we had to start over, I just did a high level format ("quick" format) then continued to install windows. Would this cause some type of performance or stability hit?

 

[pcgeek11]

Originally posted by: slugg
I dont know if this is a little off topic but...

While I was installing windows to my friend's PC, the power went out at his house. This was right after it was done doing a low level format ("slow" format). Since we had to start over, I just did a high level format ("quick" format) then continued to install windows. Would this cause some type of performance or stability hit?

No it shouldn't hurt anything as long as it was completed. Your view of a low level format is not quite correct though. The long format which you refered to as low level format is actually a full format of the drive and not a low level format. A low level format is done with the manufacturers formatting tool and writes all of the very basic format information to the drive, well beyond what windows does during a complete format. Then you have a quick format which basically gets rid of all the file pointers or FAT information making the data space available to be written over, but the data is still present on the drive platters.

You should be fine.

pcgeek11