What type of HDD format does Vista do?

[BroadbandGamer]

I clicked Format and it only took about 20 seconds. There's no way that was a complete format of my HDD. If anything is was something like Quick Format on XP.

So how do I do a real format of my HDD? Also, I didn't see anything that would let me set up and delete partitions. Can someone explain how I missed this?

Thanks!

 

[stash]

There's a partition manager in setup, there should be a button labeled advance or something on the drive screen. If you hit that, you should see option to delete and extend partitions. Or you could go to a command line (boot from DVD, click repair, then command line) and use diskpart.

The "real" format you are referring to is exactly the same as a quick format except that it uses chkdsk to check for bad sectors. As far as deleting data on the drive, they are identical.

 

[BroadbandGamer]

Originally posted by: stash
There's a partition manager in setup, there should be a button labeled advance or something on the drive screen. If you hit that, you should see option to delete and extend partitions. Or you could go to a command line (boot from DVD, click repair, then command line) and use diskpart.

The "real" format you are referring to is exactly the same as a quick format except that it uses chkdsk to check for bad sectors. As far as deleting data on the drive, they are identical.

So there is no more waiting 30 minutes for my HDD to format?

 

[stash]

Well if you really want to, you should be able to do that with format.exe from the command line. Never tried it though, I've got better things to do with my time 🙂