How long should it take to format a 160 GB Drive

Serbian

Hey there,

I just bought a 160GB Maxtor drive and installed it into my PC. I assigned a drive letter and then went to format the disk to NTFS format. The only thing is, it has been running for 13 hours and it's only 70% done It'll probably be another 4 hours + until it's done...

I reckon my mistake was to use Disk Management (the built in tool for Windows 2000, XP), but I didn't want to format in DOS as it can't format to NTFS. Is it normal to take so long? Or would a program like Partition Magic have done a better job?

Any replies mucho appreciated,

Serb

Drazhar

Partition magic is much faster than bloody Windows diskManagement. thats your problem. Bloody hell, thirteen hours!!! feck that

Serbian

Well, thirteen hours, so far. You want to know the funny thing? My mother turned off the ****ing computer while I was at work. I have to do it all over again. I think I'm going to get Partition Magic now... Anyone know if the trial version allows you to format partitions?

Serb

Ryo Hazuki

Did you Check the "Quick Format" Box?

Formatting from WindowsXP And Checking "Quick Format" takes a matter of minutes on my 80gb HDD!

Without it it takes 2+ Hours (In windowsXP setup)

Quick Format Causes No Problems.

yellum

Moving to technology forum...

Serbian

Hey,

In the end, I did indeed tick the Quick Format box on the recommendation of a couple of people in IRC I thought that it might cause problems, so that's why I didn't tick it in the first place. I still thought that 18 hours to format a drive is a little bit odd. Anyway, the quick format was done in 2 minutes.

Thanks for the replies!

Serb

quozl

is udma enabled and working properly for the drive? It's about the only reason I can think for it being that crazily slow

Gerry

Theres something up there, hopefully just a setup issue and your drive will work fast in windows. Even 2 minutes for a quick format sounds a bit long, took 10 seconds for a 40 gig drive on my laptop ( p3 450 ).

po0k

what harddrive make/model are you isng? and what IDE controller card?

Aaik there are issues when trying to access partitions/drives over 137Gigs in capactiy(130,000,000 bytes). You probably have to doa firmware fidgit (check drive manufacturer sites) and possibly install a driver on Windows for the controller.

sci0x

Download a demo of it here.

Yes i'm pretty sure it does most stuff that the full version can do including formatting your drive.

xen

Ok it took me about 3 secs to format and partition my 160 gb hard drive from a dos utility that i got from Western Digital.



Maxtor might have a similar tool.

unkel

If the drive is brand new, never used / formatted, there is no reason why you shouldn't use quick format. I'd have thought this should take more like 20-30 seconds though

Virus_Inc

Be warned though - quick formatting is useful if you can be fagged waiting but it will mean slighly lower performance on the drive for a while as it basically formats the space as it uses it rather than doing it all in one hit. Having said that I'd prolly still use it

Serbian

Hey again,

Just to answer a few of the questions.

Gerry: It may have taken less than 2 minutes to do the quick format as I left the computer to make a cup of coffee, thinking that it would take ages again anyway . It may have only been 20 seconds.

SyxPak: I'm not using an IDE controller card, and I have heard about the 137 GB problem, but as far as I know, this is only evident on motherboards with a VIA chipset.

Xen: There is a tool that Maxtor have for their harddrives. I think it's called MaxPower or something stupid like that [I think they got the name off a hair-dryer]. You can get it here.