My girlfriend has an HP laptop, and besides the obvious, I can't figure out what's going wrong when I reformat it. After I mark the old partition for deletion and tell it to go ahead and format the drive to create the new NTFS partition, it takes FOREVER to format. I started it at ~6pm yesterday and it's at 11% now. It's been steadily increasing so I know it's not hung up or anything, just taking a really long time. I've reformatted a few computers in my day and I've never had one take anywhere near this long, never more than an hour tops for the actual formatting stage. Anyone have any idea what's happening?

3/4/2006 11:13:02 AM

how big is the drive?

Also you could have just done the quick format. but yes that's entirely too long.

3/4/2006 11:21:29 AM

I can't remember, but I think the drive is ~60Gb

actually while we're on it, what's the difference between a quick and a standard format?

3/4/2006 11:25:13 AM

full format takes longer usually due to it writing all bits as 0's which truly deletes and wipes all data on the drive. a quick format deletes the data on the drive and reports it as empty but the data still remains. usually someone with training will still be able to access that data even after the quick format.

[Edited on March 4, 2006 at 12:40 PM. Reason : .]

3/4/2006 12:39:44 PM

ah, okay.. understandably a full format would take longer, but days? i mean there's something wrong here. would it be better to halt the process and do a quick format?

3/4/2006 2:20:09 PM

a full format on either of my computers will not take days but maybe about 30-40 minutes, depending on which HDD i'm doing. but days will definitely throw up a red flag. i read it was a laptop that u r doin this to. the laptop is plugged in and not running off the battery right? i would honestly stop the format. do a quick one and then install XP. upon finishin the installation, do a disk check scan of the hard drive for errors and bad sectors to see if that was a possible cause of slowing down the full format.

3/4/2006 3:02:24 PM

i had this problem with a laptop (and a desktop, for that matter)...turned out the hard drives died shortly afterward...don't know if they're related, but eh

that said, i have an new 80gb seagate i'll sell you for $120

3/4/2006 3:06:36 PM

^^ that's what i ended up doing

^and come to think of it, a lot of the things this computer was doing reminds me of hard drive malfunction...a reformat may not fix it

3/4/2006 11:52:50 PM