Really fast way to format .... - Forget it ;)

[GeSuN]

Hi,

We formatted 2 drives at work, one with FAT32 filesystem and the other one with NTFS. We've made ghost images of those 2 drives (the files are really small... less than 500kb).

Anyway, if I load ghost and dump the FAT32 image on a hard drive, I get a newly formatted hard drive in less than a second!!! I can then dump the NTFS image on the same hard drive and in less than a second again, my drive is formatted in the NTFS filesystem...

We've made some testing at work, and everything seems to be working correctly after the "formatting".

I'm just wondering if there's something wrong with doing this, and if not, why in the world, would I want to format my hard drives again using the plain format command???

Thanks in advance!!!

GeSuN

 

[imported_Phil]

You do know how to do a quick format, right?

 

[GeSuN]

Can you convert a 80GB FAT32 drive into a NTFS in less than a second?

 

[Snooper]

Let's see if my brain is working this morning...

When you use Ghost, all you are doing is overwriting the file allocation table with the Ghost image. Given that it is only 500k, of course it only takes a second. When you do a true full format, you are writing the entire disk to zeros as well as creating a new file allocation table (either FAT or NTFS). It also identifies and marks bad sectors at this time. When you ghost it, it just assumes all of the sectors are good.

So, do you want to verify the disk? Or just "reformat" it and go about your business. Your call. I'm not sure if the quick format will be as fast as Ghosting it. If my memory is correct, Ghost is very fast at writing images to the drive.

 

[GeSuN]

let's just forget this thread heheeh

i guess that it's my brain that wasnt working this morning and after eating breakfast, i realized how stupid my question was heheh

 

[imported_Phil]

Originally posted by: GeSuN
Can you convert a 80GB FAT32 drive into a NTFS in less than a second?

Well no, but I can quick-format a drive in NTFS format in about four seconds.

eg.

format /q /FS:NTFS

Job done.

 

[sxftdeep]

!