Ok to stop drive reformatting?

Soldato
Joined
28 Sep 2004
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Devon, UK
Hi, in the middle of reformating my pc, and am just wondering, as the windows reformat is taking so long, wether i can stop it and do it with partition magic instead. Or is stoping the reformatting part way through a bad idea?

Thanks,
Mark
 
If you stop a drive halfway through, in my experience, you will NOT be able to use the partition you were formatting, and will instead have to re-partition the disk and format again.

Not sure if it could damage the disk. If it doesn't crash halfway through, i'd let it format before you do anything :)
 
SATA drives are designed to be faster and therefore have mechanical functions and specifications conducive to this end, hence they perform operations like formatting quicker. When a drive is reformatted through the "full Format" option (as opposed to the "quick" option) blocks of blank data (ie 1's & 0's) are written to the whole area of the drive completely erasing it (Quick formatting just erases the TOC or index so that the drive assumes its blank as it has no way to locate the data, which then gets progressivley overwritten in future use).

As regaurds stopping it half way through formatting, this would have no real implications if you are planning a full format anyway however it will screw up the function of the disk, ie you wont be able to use it until it is fully formatted, however it will not damage it no.
 
Ultra_Extreme said:
When a drive is reformatted through the "full Format" option (as opposed to the "quick" option) blocks of blank data (ie 1's & 0's) are written to the whole area of the drive completely erasing it
Nope, it checks for bad sectors
 
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