XP Pro Setup Hard Drive Format

[coolego1]

I finally decided to reformat my computer and start from scratch. This of course involves formatting the disk. I put in the XP Pro CD, booted up no problem, installed my RAID drivers (which I'm not using as a RAID anyway) and told it to reformat the partition that Windows was on previously. I told it not to use the "Quick Format" option because I knew the difference would be long, but not this long! Basically, I started this thing last night at 11:00pm and it is now 10:00am and it is still formatting. It got really slow around 66 percent, but it's still chugging through. Any ideas? Can I just turn it off and start again?

 

[corkyg]

How big a drive is it? A full format walks through the entire drive surface. Anyway - that is too long a time.

I would do this the old fashioned way. Boot with Ultimate Bood CD, FDISK, create active partition, and format.

UBCD

 

[coolego1]

The drive is 200GB, but I've formatted it before and it only took like an hour maybe. It's still going now, 12 and a half hours later. it's moved a whopping 2 percent in the last 2 hours. Point being I can turn it off without killing anything?

 

[JonnyBlaze]

yes. kill it and choose quick format.

 

[uallas5]

If it's moving at 1% an hour, something's wrong. It could be finding and marking bad sectors, that'll tank the formatting speed big time.

I just re-read your post, if it was moving along normal than really slowed down, I'd say it's finding bad sectors and marking them as such. You don't want to do a quick format at this point cause you want it to find the reast of the bad ones.

If you have already quick formatted, you'll probably luck out in that the bad sectors seem to be at the end of the drive. As soon as you're not going to use the computer for a while, like a couple of days, run a scandisk with surface checking and it'll have a chance to finish it's job.

I once tried to 'save' a drive on a 486 by doing a surface scan. Left for the weekend and 70 hours later it was still going. Tossed the drive at that point.