Formatting an old corrupt disk - pointers plz?

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publiusdiamond

New Member
I'm currently operating Windows from an 80gb hard drive which the nice man at the repair shop put in for me. Computer is running fine from it, no problems. It's also a good old trusty IDE drive so I don't have to bother with all that SATA nonsense. However, my old hard drive (which is the C Drive, it is still detected and comes up on the SATA interface but is corrupt and thoroughly unreadable) is a 160Gb drive and I could really do with getting it back. I've backed up all my data; all it's doing now is sitting there unusable. Is it perfectly safe to just format it? Is there anything else I should do beforehand?
 
If your information is backed up and it is always unreadable then formatting it should either help it or just not work. In which case you really have nothing to lose by trying to format it.
 
Excellent, I'll give it a go now. How long will a 160Gb hard drive take to format? (Although it does read it as 120Gb...is that space lost permanently?)
 
formatting it will erase everything. is the drive corrupt, or just the files?
use the windows disk to format it if you want to put windows on it.
if its just an extra disk that you want to use for storage, then format it in windows hard disk manager. be careful, you can erase stuff on other drives if you accidentally reformat one. make sure you click on the correct drive.
depends on the drive speed not size, if its decent less than an hour. 2hrs tops most likely... for a newer 160gb
if you made a 120gb partition on a 160gb hard drive, then theres just 40gb unpartitioned. you can partition unpartitioned space whenever you like... but it shows up as a seperate hard drive.
 
There were 2 partitions on it, One was tiny though and just contained important system files. It still appears to be accessible but as I have Windows running from my new H: it should be ok, right?
 
Wait, no worries, I just ran it through GetDataBack and it's not a system file folder it's an empty partition which was supposed to be used for recovery; it's not a bootable partition. Problem solved.
 
publiusdiamond said:
Excellent, I'll give it a go now. How long will a 160Gb hard drive take to format? (Although it does read it as 120Gb...is that space lost permanently?)
Click to expand...


I'm not sure how long it will take I believe it can take up to a half hour or more, and if you format it you should be able to the use of the full drive and not lose the 120gb. Also I don't know if you know this or not but windows measures space in a different way then most hard drive companies. for example I have a 250gb hard drive that reads 232gb in windows.
 
Ahh...that works out about right then. I'm bound to have lost a bit of space on the way I suppose. Right, I'll have a crack at it now I think. Cheers for the help!
 
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