How long should it take to format a partition?

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truwrikodrorowrelupicugojestutroclulachosaswunuhospikigawakijosaswenomaruclojeueclikaspedrubewidebrisubrohutrurifruuagothunugekedrumucisiuobrobrecrupeslapuswosluprothethibakaslechurathikucli
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Recently I made a 30GB partition and formatted the partition to NTFS. The formatting took over an hour. This seems like an excessively long time.

I have 2.5", 9mm, 320GB, 5400rpm hard drive on which I recently extended a partition; then cleaned the drive with System Cleaner, and ran CHKDSK before defragmented the drive. Then I made an image file and stored it on an xSATA drive, before wiping the internal hard drive, and restoring from the backup.

The restore took 7 minutes but formatting a 30GB drive partition took more than hour. The cleaning took several hours and so did defragging. How long should these operations take? It seems to me each of these operations took a long time. Could it be the drive is out of alignment? KC

Sat, 11/28/2009 - 21:31
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truwrikodrorowrelupicugojestutroclulachosaswunuhospikigawakijosaswenomaruclojeueclikaspedrubewidebrisubrohutrurifruuagothunugekedrumucisiuobrobrecrupeslapuswosluprothethibakaslechurathikucli
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Did you do the formatting when using DD in Windows or was when booted to the DD CD? If the CD, it's possible the Linux drivers being used couldn't access the drive properly. You might try the Safe Mode version.

Standard formatting is usually very quick with DD. It should have only taken a few seconds.

I wouldn't think that any alignment being used would cause a slow-down on a standard single mechanical drive.

Note: It's normally not necessary to reformat the destination partition of a restore.

Tue, 12/01/2009 - 17:26