Originally Posted by
BigLar
Remember the old days? There we were with our 20 or 30 MB HD's, running DOS or Win 3.1, and we'd get some sort of screwup, and we had to re-format the drive. Or, we bought a new one and it came raw, so we had to format it. No big deal - boot from a floppy, type "format c: /u /s" and away it would go. 5-10 minutes later, it was all done and we could re-load our apps/data.
Remember the *older* days when you had to run:
debug
-g = c800:5 (or c800:ccc)
and set interleave to low-level format? Even more fun was had by having to type in the sector defect table from the label of the drive, but I digress.
Even though it takes hours to perform a full format on a large HD I always bite the bullet & do it for a new drive to force it to access each sector. Checking the S.M.A.R.T. results afterwards can reveal if sectors were reallocated or uncorrectable which you won't see immediately with a quick format.
Formatting a 2TB USB 2.0 drive is also a fun way to pass the time when calling the UA service desk.