formats - quick and normal?

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Juice Daddy

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Whats the difference between a quick format and a format... when installing windows?(besides one being faster)
 
Full does a complete surface scan of the drive before writting the partition data. Quick does not. Full take s a lot longer but when it's finished you will be sure that your drive does not have any bad sectors or clusters.
 
RicoDirenzo said:
Quick does not.


quick only erases the partition data. This inforamtion is used to find files on the drive. So the data is still on the drive but you os doesn't recognize it cus it doesn't know where the files are.
 
csamuels said:
quick only erases the partition data. This inforamtion is used to find files on the drive. So the data is still on the drive but you os doesn't recognize it cus it doesn't know where the files are.

but wouldn't that make the new partition smaller? or is it just writing over it?
 
RicoDirenzo[/i] Quick does not.[/QUOTE] [QUOTE][i]Originally posted by csamuels said:
quick only erases the partition data. This inforamtion is used to find files on the drive. So the data is still on the drive but you os doesn't recognize it cus it doesn't know where the files are.

what he was saying is the quick erase doesn't use checkdisc(scandisc). the full format does use it on the xp disc. that is the only difference between the 2. both of the options does a quick erase. if you want a true full erase, you will have to use other tools like powermax or fdisc
 
The problem with a quick format is that, some of data can be left behind. This can cause trouble if you are changing from FAT32 to NTFS, as NTFS can read FAT32, and they conflict. I learned this the hard way when my network did not work because I did a quick format.
 
quick format and full format are as listed above. They do NOT write zeros to the drive. To do that you can use the format /u switch or use a low level formating utility. The /u switch thingie is like the old days of debugging a HDD. It means unconditional.
 
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