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Formatting a 90 % full18 GB HD in Win XP takes less than 1 sec???

Edward
in Computer Science

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Ok just put in my old hd as a second driv in my comp it was nearly full i did a "Quick format" in win XP (Right click the drive in my comp...) and it took less than 1 sec. Win says it is empty now but im not sure. I don't care about data security or ne thing will my drive have normal preformance n everything?

1 second does sound a bit unreal... As it's your second HDD and you are obviously prepared to loose all the data from it I would run a high level format (such as booting into DOS (press F8 at startup) and using the format command.

 

Alternatively just right click on the drive and do not tick the 'quick format' box.

Well it's XP so I assumed NTFS

I reformatted to the default FAT32

 

Quick format simply marks the files as non-existant. If you did care about data security, you woudn't want to do that because all the files are still accessable with a bit of work. Since you don't care, every thing is fine and I'd be surprized if you have any performance issuse. The old files will be over-written slowly as the drive fills up, but old 1's and 0's won't interfere any more than new 0's in an blank HDD.

I reformatted to the default FAT32

 

Default for XP should not NTFS...

 

XP is designed to work with NTFS, it will work with others (FAT, FAT32 etc) though.

As would I.... which is why XP is set to use NTFS by default, the only way it would be FAT or FAT32 is if the user changed the default option, or if something is seriously corrupt!

...the only way it would be FAT or FAT32 is if the user changed the default option, or if something is seriously corrupt!

 

or if the disk was previously formatted in FAT32, as was the case here. In this case it is far easier to run a quick format and leave the file system as is.

  • Author

Ok you guys obviously have a file system preference can you give me a lil info on this?

1 second does sound a bit unreal... As it's your second HDD and you are obviously prepared to loose all the data from it I would run a high level format (such as booting into DOS (press F8 at startup) and using the format command.

 

Alternatively just right click on the drive and do not tick the 'quick format' box.

 

if hes running xp he doesnt have dos running underneath. to get to dos on a computer with xp you have to have a floppy or harddrive with dos on it. dos doesnt work with NTFS so thats out too.

 

1 sec seems a bit fast, but if its a quick format it didnt actually write over the whole disk, it just marked the entire disk as empty. if you dont care about file security and windows says the disk is empty then i wouldnt worry about it. if you really feel like wiping it you can boot from your windows install cd and one of the first things it will show you is a screen for formatting your partitions. figure out which letter is the one you dont need and tell it to format that partition.

 

(or, like he said, just dont do the quick partition)

Yup, command prompt (aka cmd) would format a secondary/slave HDD, obviously it couldn't format the master/primary HDD, but it'd have no problem doing a HDD where the OS is not stored.

well in that case cant you just go start, run, cmd instead of restarting and hitting f8?

all the quick format does is wipe the partition table and filesystem, so i'd be surprised if it took much longer.

 

as for fs preference, my vote goes to ReiserFS.

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