sky brow Posted August 7, 2003 Author Report Share Posted August 7, 2003 Hi, Thanks for the info.It looks like a clean install is the way to go.Should I use active killdisk to wipe the drive?Or just use full install on the xp pro cd.Which is the better option? cheers sky brow. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
carlton68 Posted August 7, 2003 Report Share Posted August 7, 2003 When installign XP it offeres you to convert the partition to NTFS or leave it as FAT32, and also askes if you want a quick format or normal format. Guess all the options you need unless you want to change partitions and sizes. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kamui Posted August 7, 2003 Report Share Posted August 7, 2003 Says carlton68: When installign XP it offeres you to convert the partition to NTFS or leave it as FAT32, and also askes if you want a quick format or normal format. Guess all the options you need unless you want to change partitions and sizes. As carlton said: choose NTFS and the partition will be formated, no need to run format in advance. BTW: what's the difference between "quick format" and "normal format"? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Posted August 7, 2003 Report Share Posted August 7, 2003 what's the difference between "quick format" and "normal format"? Quick format skips doing a disk check for errors saving some time. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
carlton68 Posted August 7, 2003 Report Share Posted August 7, 2003 Difference between Quick format and 'normal' format is that quick format only initiallizes the file allocation table (where the positions of all the files on the disk are stored). Thus the files will still be there on the harddisk and can be recovered with some unerase tools. Whereas normal format will initiallize the whole partition and therefore you shouldn't be able to unerase anything. You can try it. Take a floppy and choose format. In the format box that opens you can choose 'Qick format'. Format it twice, once with 'Quick format' checked, once without. You'll notice the difference. My collegue told me that only doing Quick format of the disk and then installing the new OS might cause problems on the long run. Somehow I'm not convinced. Does anybody know more about formatting? carlton Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Posted August 7, 2003 Report Share Posted August 7, 2003 Difference between Quick format and 'normal' format is that quick format only initiallizes the file allocation table (where the positions of all the files on the disk are stored). Thus the files will still be there on the harddisk and can be recovered with some unerase tools. Whereas normal format will initiallize the whole partition and therefore you shouldn't be able to unerase anything. Operation differs for floppies and hard drives. For floppies: In a quick format, the disk is not actually formatted at the hardware/sector level. Fresh file system structures are simply written over the top of whatever is there. Other sectors -- the ones used to hold the actual contents of your files -- are left alone and will therefore contain whatever they contained before the quick format. This is pretty much as you describe. In a standard format: the tracks of the floppy are rewritten at the hardware level -- the low-level structure of the disk is recreated, and so the disk is effectively wiped. Note that this explains why a floppy cannot be quickformatted to a different density (i.e., if the disk is formatted 1.44MB, you cannot quickformat it to 720K). For hard drives: Quick format is similar to floppies. Fresh file system structures are written out that's about it. A normal format does not actually reformat the sectors at the hardware level; it performs a hardware-level verify of each sector on the drive. The hardware-level verify is a read operation, so even after a normal format, data from files that existed before may still be recoverable. My collegue told me that only doing Quick format of the disk and then installing the new OS might cause problems on the long run. Sectors found to be bad during the verify stage of a disk format will be marked as do-not-use in the filesystem structures. For hard drives, the thing that makes a quick format quick is skipping the verify stage. Therefore if the drive has developed some bad sectors since the last time it was non-quick formatted, they will may be recorded as bad in the filesystem structures and the OS might put (or try to put) data on them. So your colleage kinda has a point, in that installing an OS might be a good time to let the OS perform its full checks as a kind of safety measure. But modern OSes will recover from bad sectors pretty well, marking sectors as bad on the fly etc and many drives will handle sector remaps at the hardware level, hiding this from the OS/user. Hope that helps. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
adikgede Posted August 7, 2003 Report Share Posted August 7, 2003 I think that the full format just does an integrity check , reads and rights looking for bad blocks. Seems like the best time to do it. Don't want to find out about a problem after you installed your software. It really slows down the install but its a lot faster than having to do over again. I dont use windows that much and I hate having to attend to interactive installations plan on having something to read and something to snack on Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sky brow Posted August 8, 2003 Author Report Share Posted August 8, 2003 Thanks for that.I will get back to you blokes and tell you how it went.For anyone thats interested. cheers sky brow. :: Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BritTim Posted August 11, 2003 Report Share Posted August 11, 2003 quick format or normal format Unless you are using a pretty old hard drive, there is no real advantage to a normal format. Modern hard drives have continuous builtin diagnostics that dynamically detect surface errors and recover from them. Actually, that leads to other problems: when a drive is near to complete failure, there may be no symptoms other than I/O appears slower than before. You see no error messages until there are irrecoverable errors. A normal format is no help for this. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sky brow Posted August 14, 2003 Author Report Share Posted August 14, 2003 Hi Guys, For anyone interested,the install went without a hitch.Yes,not one.And my friend now thinks I am some sort of pc guru.I wish! Thanks again to all for your advice. cheers sky brow :) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts
Archived
This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.