Interrupted low level format on Samsung 160GB disk

[AB]

While troubleshooting my new Samsung SP1614N disk installation, I
downloaded the HUTIL utility from the Samsung site. Among other
things, this lets you do a low level format. (Probably not a *true*
low level format).

Anyway, I started this off, and it was incredibly slow. After 5-10
minutes it was only 0.001% done. Realising it was going to take weeks
at that rate, I pressed ESC to stop it. I hope that it left things in
a tidy and consistent state. It did run for a few seconds after I hit
ESC, so guess it didn't stop in the middle of anything. Is this likely
to cause problems? Should it run this slow? (The drive was only
running at UDMA 33 as it was slave to an old disk at that stage).

I have now partitioned the disk in Windows 2000 using the disk
manager. When doing this, I asked it to do a "quick format". Should I
do a full format?

I will still install Windows 2000 on the new disk, so I will probably
reformat the boot partition then.

Just wondering what good practice is with a new disk:
- low level format?
- normal Windows format?
- surface scan?

I don't want to risk future problems through not formatting the disk
properly. But I also don't want to spend a week formatting it!

thanks in advance.

 

[Alex Marsden]

i recently bought a new 60gb disk. ready for a new install of winxp. all i
did was install the disk, and use fdisk to create a partition and format it
in dos. of course this could not do a quick format because it had not been
previously formatted. So it has had a full format to FAT32.

i think the winxp setup also does this for either NTFS of FAT32 but i wanted
to run the setup from disk. if you boot the win2k/xp setup disk and run
setup it should provide you with an automatic format option.

If the disk is for secondary use i see no problems that shoud occur by just
using win2k/xp's built in format. If there has been no previous faults with
bad sectors or anything a quick format should be sufficient.... otherwise a
full format will allowfor any errors and can also pick up and mark bad
sectors.

Alex

 

[Rod Speed]

While troubleshooting my new Samsung SP1614N disk installation, I
downloaded the HUTIL utility from the Samsung site. Among other
things, this lets you do a low level format. (Probably not a *true*
low level format).

Anyway, I started this off, and it was incredibly slow. After 5-10
minutes it was only 0.001% done. Realising it was going to take weeks
at that rate, I pressed ESC to stop it. I hope that it left things in
a tidy and consistent state. It did run for a few seconds after I hit
ESC, so guess it didn't stop in the middle of anything. Is this likely
to cause problems? Should it run this slow? (The drive was only
running at UDMA 33 as it was slave to an old disk at that stage).

I have now partitioned the disk in Windows 2000 using the disk
manager. When doing this, I asked it to do a "quick format". Should I
do a full format?

Not necessary.

I will still install Windows 2000 on the new disk,
so I will probably reformat the boot partition then.

Just wondering what good practice is with a new disk:
- low level format?

Never. Only try that with a drive thats been used for
a while and appears to have developed a problem.

- normal Windows format?
Yep.

- surface scan?

I usually start that and let it go for a while with a large drive,
basically because its a quick check that there isnt some
fundamental problem. But I dont bother to let it complete
because that takes quite a bit of time with modern large drives.

I don't want to risk future problems through not formatting the disk
properly. But I also don't want to spend a week formatting it!

Yeah, the OS level format is all thats necessary.