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Formatting a FAT32 disk
I have an old desktop PC in which I have been swapping HDDs.
Previously one of the drives, a 4.1GB, was used with Linux, which now I want to reload Windows 98. I have since used a GParted LiveCD to delete/recreate the partition table and have created a single Fat32 primary partition for the entire 4.1GB. Now I have used an old Windows98 startup floppy disk and run: format c: /u It shows: Formatting 4.102.5M Trying to recover allocation unit 69,656 This has been running now for about 3 hours. It's an old desktop PC, Pentium II, 350MHz, 750MB RAM. The machine is slow so I expected it to take a while. Can anybody suggest how much longer this might take to complete formatting? Thanks |
#2
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Formatting a FAT32 disk
gargoyle60 wrote:
I have an old desktop PC in which I have been swapping HDDs. Previously one of the drives, a 4.1GB, was used with Linux, which now I want to reload Windows 98. I have since used a GParted LiveCD to delete/recreate the partition table and have created a single Fat32 primary partition for the entire 4.1GB. Now I have used an old Windows98 startup floppy disk and run: format c: /u It shows: Formatting 4.102.5M Trying to recover allocation unit 69,656 This has been running now for about 3 hours. It's an old desktop PC, Pentium II, 350MHz, 750MB RAM. The machine is slow so I expected it to take a while. Can anybody suggest how much longer this might take to complete formatting? Depends. There are reports on the www of format running for *days*. Your hard drive is quite likely damaged. Physical damage to one or more platters, that is, not a data error. This means that it's time to discard the drive and using something else. You *could* use a 3rd party util to figure out the bad sectors and work around them, but damage tends to spread, and would result in data loss, sooner or later. Best bet is to junk the drive. 4 GB I'd toss without a second thought. -- Marketers can promise the world, but it's the engineers who have to deliver. |
#3
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Formatting a FAT32 disk
Auric wrote:
gargoyle60 wrote: I have an old desktop PC in which I have been swapping HDDs. Previously one of the drives, a 4.1GB, was used with Linux, which now I want to reload Windows 98. I have since used a GParted LiveCD to delete/recreate the partition table and have created a single Fat32 primary partition for the entire 4.1GB. Now I have used an old Windows98 startup floppy disk and run: format c: /u It shows: Formatting 4.102.5M Trying to recover allocation unit 69,656 This has been running now for about 3 hours. It's an old desktop PC, Pentium II, 350MHz, 750MB RAM. The machine is slow so I expected it to take a while. Can anybody suggest how much longer this might take to complete formatting? Depends. There are reports on the www of format running for *days*. Your hard drive is quite likely damaged. Physical damage to one or more platters, that is, not a data error. This means that it's time to discard the drive and using something else. You *could* use a 3rd party util to figure out the bad sectors and work around them, but damage tends to spread, and would result in data loss, sooner or later. Best bet is to junk the drive. 4 GB I'd toss without a second thought. The smallest I see sold at newegg.com is 18.2GB starting at $69 but that is for a SCSI drive. For $69, you could buy a much larger PATA or SATA drive (the old computer probably only supports PATA aka IDE), like an 160GB WDC IDE drive for $50. https://mintguide.org/system/283-how...inux-mint.html That describes how to check for bad blocks. I'd also look at the Current Pending Sector Count in the SMART data of the drive to see if the bad blocks are actually getting re-mapped to reserve disk space. If the count does not go down, all of the reserved space on the disk has already been consumed so none of the current or future bad detected blocks will get their data moved to have them reallocated to good space. See https://kb.acronis.com/content/9133. For the drive to have spare reserved space and for remapping to work for bad blocks, this value should show as zero; i.e., any detected bad blocks have gotten moved to available reserved disk space. To see how many bad blocks have been remapped in the past, look at the Reallocated Sectors Count value. Mine is zero which means none have shown up yet (it is a new drive and remapping is performed at the factory during testing there - no magnetic media is perfect so there will be some initial remapping). Pending sectors (for remapping) cannot happen until the drive can successfully read the data from the bad sector to move that data to a good sector in the reserved disk space. If the data cannot be read (to copy it) then the block remains pending. I use HD (Hard Disk) Sentinel to monitor the SMART data. http://www.hdsentinel.com/compatibility_os.php says it will still work with Windows 98 but not earlier. http://www.extremetech.com/computing...s-about-to-die That article indicates the most important SMART values you should check regarding the health of an HDD. Not sure SMART is of any value with SSDs due to them masking bad memory blocks and their load balancing; i.e., problems with SSDs are probably not gradually detectable but the SSD just suddenly dies catastrophically. Does the GPartd Live CD include inspection or monitoring tools to show the SMART data of an HDD, especially the values mentioned in the above article, like "smartctl --health dev" and "smartctl --all dev"? |
#4
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Formatting a FAT32 disk
On Thursday, October 6, 2016 at 7:46:16 AM UTC-6, gargoyle60 wrote:
I have an old desktop PC in which I have been swapping HDDs. Previously one of the drives, a 4.1GB, was used with Linux, which now I want to reload Windows 98. I have since used a GParted LiveCD to delete/recreate the partition table and have created a single Fat32 primary partition for the entire 4.1GB. Now I have used an old Windows98 startup floppy disk and run: format c: /u It shows: Formatting 4.102.5M Trying to recover allocation unit 69,656 This has been running now for about 3 hours. It's an old desktop PC, Pentium II, 350MHz, 750MB RAM. The machine is slow so I expected it to take a while. Can anybody suggest how much longer this might take to complete formatting? Thanks Those are pretty decent specs for a 98 box back in the day, you shouldn't be having troubles. I can recommend Bart's Disktool for testing your hard drive with and it will fit on that 98 boot floppy. If it passes, then I would erase it for 5 minutes to then bail out of the zero write 'test' there. Then I would use MS FDISK to create your FAT32 partition with which is on the boot floppy already and then you should have no trouble using format.com to pull off a format on it. You will have to reboot between Fdisk and format attempts. I don't have any experience with any of the methods you are using, I can't know that it works. |
#5
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Formatting a FAT32 disk
On Thu, 6 Oct 2016 15:49:42 -0500, VanguardLH wrote:
Does the GPartd Live CD include inspection or monitoring tools to show the SMART data of an HDD, especially the values mentioned in the above article, like "smartctl --health dev" and "smartctl --all dev"? I don't know, I will need to check. |
#6
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Formatting a FAT32 disk
On Fri, 7 Oct 2016 01:23:58 -0700 (PDT), Lee wrote:
On Thursday, October 6, 2016 at 7:46:16 AM UTC-6, gargoyle60 wrote: I have an old desktop PC in which I have been swapping HDDs. Previously one of the drives, a 4.1GB, was used with Linux, which now I want to reload Windows 98. I have since used a GParted LiveCD to delete/recreate the partition table and have created a single Fat32 primary partition for the entire 4.1GB. Now I have used an old Windows98 startup floppy disk and run: format c: /u It shows: Formatting 4.102.5M Trying to recover allocation unit 69,656 This has been running now for about 3 hours. It's an old desktop PC, Pentium II, 350MHz, 750MB RAM. The machine is slow so I expected it to take a while. Can anybody suggest how much longer this might take to complete formatting? Thanks Those are pretty decent specs for a 98 box back in the day, you shouldn't be having troubles. I can recommend Bart's Disktool for testing your hard drive with and it will fit on that 98 boot floppy. If it passes, then I would erase it for 5 minutes to then bail out of the zero write 'test' there. Then I would use MS FDISK to create your FAT32 partition with which is on the boot floppy already and then you should have no trouble using format.com to pull off a format on it. You will have to reboot between Fdisk and format attempts. I don't have any experience with any of the methods you are using, I can't know that it works. I was told (yonks ago) that the /U option is an undocumented very low-level format and can be slow. I aborted the forrmat and tried MS FDISK which said everything was already correctly partitioned. I did a "format c: /S" and it ran okay without any bad blocks being reported. I shall avoid using /U in future. Now Windows98 has installed and starts just fine. |
#7
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Formatting a FAT32 disk
On Thu, 6 Oct 2016 16:26:24 -0000 (UTC), "Auric__" wrote:
4 GB I'd toss without a second thought. I'm only keeping them as a novelty. One 4GB drive will hold Windows 98, the other 4GB drive will serve as an extra Linux swap-space. |
#8
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Formatting a FAT32 disk
gargoyle60 wrote:
I was told (yonks ago) that the /U option is an undocumented very low-level format and can be slow. It means "unconditional", and it's mean to zero out the drive, not just write a new file table (which is what happens with a "normal" format). It can take a while, but it shouldn't be "hours"... certainly not on a 4 GB drive. I aborted the forrmat and tried MS FDISK which said everything was already correctly partitioned. I did a "format c: /S" and it ran okay without any bad blocks being reported. I shall avoid using /U in future. Now Windows98 has installed and starts just fine. Now run scandisk and have it check for bad blocks (the "thorough" test). Start the scan and walk away; it'll take a while. Regarding your other post: keeping thedrives as a novelty is all fine and dandy -- I had some full-height hard drives 20+ years after they were useful, and still have a couple 5-1/4" floppy drives which are still seeing some limited use -- but don't use them for anything "serious". Drives have a finite life span. -- You are an evil, evil man. |
#9
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Formatting a FAT32 disk
On Thu, 06 Oct 2016 14:46:15 +0100, gargoyle60 wrote:
I have an old desktop PC in which I have been swapping HDDs. Previously one of the drives, a 4.1GB, was used with Linux, which now I want to reload Windows 98. I have since used a GParted LiveCD to delete/recreate the partition table and have created a single Fat32 primary partition for the entire 4.1GB. Now I have used an old Windows98 startup floppy disk and run: format c: /u It shows: Formatting 4.102.5M Trying to recover allocation unit 69,656 This has been running now for about 3 hours. It's an old desktop PC, Pentium II, 350MHz, 750MB RAM. The machine is slow so I expected it to take a while. Can anybody suggest how much longer this might take to complete formatting? Thanks That HDD is dying since bad cluster is detected. Most probably worn out, assuming that it's an old HDD. Each time the format program encountered a bad sector, it'll retry for several times. At hardware level, it'll probably about 3 times (i.e. sector reformat). At software level, it'll be between 3 to 5 times (i.e. head reseek then sector reformat). So, the total time it took to format a cluster will depend on how severe the bad sector is in one cluster. If the damage is severe enough, it may cause the hardware level formatting process to stuck. No one know the health of your HDD, so it's difficult to estimate how long the whole process would take. In worst case scenario, assuming that at least one sector is bad in every cluster, the whole process would take about 5 times longer than the time it take to format the same HDD but healthy one (without any bad sector). |
#10
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Formatting a FAT32 disk
On Friday, October 7, 2016 at 8:40:48 AM UTC-6, gargoyle60 wrote:
On Fri, 7 Oct 2016 01:23:58 -0700 (PDT), Lee wrote: On Thursday, October 6, 2016 at 7:46:16 AM UTC-6, gargoyle60 wrote: I have an old desktop PC in which I have been swapping HDDs. Previously one of the drives, a 4.1GB, was used with Linux, which now I want to reload Windows 98. I have since used a GParted LiveCD to delete/recreate the partition table and have created a single Fat32 primary partition for the entire 4.1GB. Now I have used an old Windows98 startup floppy disk and run: format c: /u It shows: Formatting 4.102.5M Trying to recover allocation unit 69,656 This has been running now for about 3 hours. It's an old desktop PC, Pentium II, 350MHz, 750MB RAM. The machine is slow so I expected it to take a while. Can anybody suggest how much longer this might take to complete formatting? Thanks Those are pretty decent specs for a 98 box back in the day, you shouldn't be having troubles. I can recommend Bart's Disktool for testing your hard drive with and it will fit on that 98 boot floppy. If it passes, then I would erase it for 5 minutes to then bail out of the zero write 'test' there. Then I would use MS FDISK to create your FAT32 partition with which is on the boot floppy already and then you should have no trouble using format..com to pull off a format on it. You will have to reboot between Fdisk and format attempts. I don't have any experience with any of the methods you are using, I can't know that it works. I was told (yonks ago) that the /U option is an undocumented very low-level format and can be slow. I aborted the forrmat and tried MS FDISK which said everything was already correctly partitioned. I did a "format c: /S" and it ran okay without any bad blocks being reported. I shall avoid using /U in future. Now Windows98 has installed and starts just fine. You won't get any bad sector/cluster report with format except on floppies. Switch /U is not undocumented, type format /? and read about all the switches. What /U does is ignore the bad sector list and attempt to format all sectors. The reason it takes time is because you have a bad drive. Any other format simply adds bad sectors found at that time to the existing (and growing) bad sector list without telling you about any part of that. You need to test it to see how bad it really is before you go using it or you may loose everything you put on it. If DiskTool won't complete it's non-destructive testing, the drive really belongs in the trash can. All indications and advice is you have a bad drive going worse, ignore at your peril and have a nice day. |
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